This strategic plan lays out four targets to guide NNRG over the coming years and outlines the pathways we will follow to achieve them. Click here to read a note by our Board Chair and Executive Director about how the plan was conceived and developed.
A printable PDF of the strategic plan will be posted next month.
Work with people across a broader spectrum of interest groups, cultural identities, generations, and economic statuses than NNRG has reached in the past.
Develop a systematic approach to financial growth that supports NNRG’s programs.
TARGET 1: Provide best-in-class services, resources, and thought leadership on ecological forestry for the Pacific Northwest.
STRATEGIES
1. Supply a suite of ecological forestry services to meet the changing needs of the region’s landowners. To maintain its regional leadership in the practice of ecological forestry, NNRG must keep up with the evolving knowledge base that undergirds our work and incorporate new findings into our practice, such as the frameworks for the forest management plans we write. We will learn from other practitioners and scientific researchers and update our outreach materials accordingly, giving particular attention to wildfire preparation, climate resilience, and other forms of risk mitigation.
2. Engage with partners in higher education to conduct original research on forest stewardship in the Pacific Northwest. Forestry research by universities and public agencies is often driven by the needs of industrial timber owners, while the research needed to improve the practice of ecological forestry takes a back seat. We will maintain a list of research questions, developed in collaboration with our academic, nonprofit, and landowner partners, that we want to investigate. By developing research projects and partnering with academic scientists to design and complete them, we will help gain the knowledge we need to refine the practice of ecological forestry in the region.
3. Support an organizational culture of constant improvement. NNRG supports an internal culture of continual learning and innovation, which enables us to present the best possible ideas and resources to our stakeholders and partners. Every year, we will choose a forestry topic (e.g., soil compaction, carbon sequestration), review the best available research, and create or update a simplified resource on the topic.
TARGET 2
Promote the benefits of ecological forestry to forest managers, wood buyers, and other decision-makers in the supply chain.
STRATEGIES
1. Demonstrate to forest managers the environmental benefits and economic feasibility of ecological forestry. As a recognized regional leader in ecological forest management, NNRG is well positioned to speak with authority on the advantages that ecological forestry provides. NNRG materials explain how ecological forestry can advance landowner objectives of forest resilience, climate adaptation, risk management, asset building, and financial performance. We will use a range of communication formats tailored to specific audiences, from workshops to tours of model forests, from videos to web-based courses, to show forest owners how ecological forestry can help them achieve their objectives for their land. Through GIS mapping that distinguishes properties practicing ecological forestry, NNRG will give forest owners (and wood buyers) a new way to discern the difference that ecological forestry can make.
2. Increase the recognition ecological forestry achieves in the marketplace. Some wood buyers and specifiers would prefer to use wood that is the product of ecological or climate-smart forestry, and yet building materials’ supply chains make it difficult for them to obtain it. We will foster demand for these wood products by describing their benefits to wood users and helping create tools such as climate-smart designation so those buyers can obtain them more easily and cost-effectively. We will investigate the feasibility of a supply chain specific to ecologically raised sawlogs west of the Cascades, and, if favorable, will pursue partnerships to develop one.
3. Provide policy guidance and stewardship expertise to individual organizations and a broader audience in the forest sector. NNRG is unique in combining on-the-ground forestry expertise with an understanding of the economic and political landscape that forest owners face. We will use our knowledge to help organizations better understand available policy, carbon, tax, easement, and recreational opportunities and forest stewardship benefits through direct interaction and industry events and channels.
TARGET 3
Work with people across a broader spectrum of interest groups, cultural identities, generations, and economic statuses than NNRG has reached in the past.
STRATEGIES
1. Identify fresh segments of the forest-owning public that we aim to connect with, and craft outreach strategies that deliver the message of ecological forestry to them effectively. So far, NNRG has grown its audience organically, directing its outreach primarily to people who already own forestland and waiting for people to find us. As a result, we have lagged in connecting with some crucial stakeholders. We will test new models of recruitment — including geographic saturation within a specific subregion and outreach tailored to larger nonindustrial landowners — and refine those approaches through experience.
2. Introduce students to the theory and practice of ecological forestry. Young people are the next generation of forest practitioners and landowners. We will connect high school and college students with ecological forestry learning and provide pathways to related careers through connections with existing organizations and materials, through NNRG-developed curriculum and certificates, and NNRG-sponsored college internships.
3. Increase the diversity and capacity of the ecological forestry workforce. Ecological forestry explanatory materials have thus far been provided almost exclusively in English, even though a substantial segment of the forest restoration workforce is fluent only in Spanish. Separately, the logging workforce in the Northwest is aging. NNRG will train future ecological loggers on modern equipment and develop worker-oriented Spanish-language materials on ecological forestry approaches to precommercial thinning and tree-planting.
4. Create new pathways to engage hitherto-unreached segments of the forest-enthusiast audience. NNRG’s current website and social media posts are oriented toward readers who are forest owners and managers. We will highlight educational resources aimed at new audience segments, such as K-12 educators and aspiring forest stewards, and create streamlined digital guides on our website that each provide a curated set of resources for a specific stakeholder group.
TARGET 4
Develop a systematic approach to financial growth that supports NNRG’s programs.
STRATEGIES
1. Continue building NNRG’s fee-for-service programs. Since 2016, NNRG has intentionally expanded its capacity to offer harvest administration, more than doubling the area of harvest overseen annually, and introducing a new program in forest restoration. Growing these programs will enable us to reach more landowners, bring ecological forest management to a larger landscape, and launch new, as-yet unfunded NNRG projects.
2. Develop a program to enable landowners to dedicate their forests to ecological management for philanthropic ends. Forest ownership is on the brink of a major generational turnover, and some landowners want to dedicate their land to philanthropic goals. We will pilot a mechanism by which land trusts and other charities can receive timber harvest income from land that was offered to them in donation but which they do not wish to manage. We’ll also continue to consider gifts of land to NNRG, building on the example of two generous donors who have pledged their forest tracts to NNRG after they are no longer able to care for them.
From NNRG’s Board Chair and Executive Director:
At NNRG, we achieve our impact through the forest owners we reach. We bend the trajectory of nonindustrial forestland in Oregon and Washington toward ecological forestry not by controlling large tracts of land ourselves, but by influencing the decisions that landowners make in stewarding their own acreage.
Our mission statement lays out the three main methods we use:
Sharing knowledge about ecological forestry;
Building landowners’ capacity by enhancing their stewardship skills; and
Connecting them with markets and other financial resources that can support the cost of forest stewardship and provide a fair return for their stewardship choices.
This plan, which NNRG’s board and staff have devised for 2025-2029, aims to sharpen our use of these three tools and to broaden their application.
Our plan begins with the premise that we must keep pace with developments in the field — for instance, by understanding the impact of climate change and comprehending the role wildfire plays on the west side of the Cascades. While NNRG has become a leading promoter and practitioner of ecological forestry, we need to stay at the vanguard of forest knowledge to provide the greatest value to the communities we serve.
Our second premise is that we must share our knowledge so that participants in the forest supply chain can put it into action. Knowledge doesn’t help if it doesn’t reach forest owners, and the distinct value and narrative of ecological forestry is lost if wood buyers can’t readily specify its products in their purchasing decisions. We want forest owners to understand the desirability and feasibility of ecological forestry, and wood buyers to recognize the benefits of ecologically raised wood.
Third, we see tremendous potential to reach new audiences. Western Washington has more than 26,000 forest owners of 20 acres or more. We must become more strategic about connecting with fresh segments of the forest-owning population, as well as other people who care about the forests that surround them here in the Pacific Northwest. To do that, we will use new systems to identify forest owners we have yet to reach, and partner with like-minded organizations to reach new ears through their networks.
With this plan, we will build on our past successes to improve our tools, share them more widely, and have a deeper impact on the forests of the Pacific Northwest and their contributions to stabilizing the climate, safeguarding regional water supplies, and conserving biodiversity. We hope you are as excited as we are to further this journey.
Christine Johnson Board Chair
Seth Zuckerman Executive Director
Some of NNRG’s staff and board from our retreat in May 2024 when we began shaping this strategic plan. Standing, from left: Forester Matthew Schmidt, Program Manager Laura Linn, Lead Forester Jaal Mann, Board member Roberta McFarland, Board member Marco Lowenstein, Finance Manager Karen Gray, Executive Director Seth Zuckerman, Board chair Christine Johnson, Board member Chris Larson, Board member Jeremy Schoenfeld. In Front: Director of Programs Rowan Braybrook and Director of Forestry Kirk Hanson.
