Well, hi everybody.
I'm Monica Przyperhart.
I'm the Program Director with Cold Hollow to Canada.
And so today's session, it's a working session,
so it's gonna be a little different
from the earlier sessions.
Come on in, welcome.
And we're gonna move from a lot of the sessions
that I've been to have really been
about the research and monitoring side,
this is moving from that research and monitoring
into how do we actually communicate
those messages and that research
with landowners in our community
who can learn from it and do something with it.
So, that's going to be our focus.
In today's workshop,
I see this as being divided into three sections.
I'll start out by giving a bit of a presentation
about the Woodlots Program at Cold Hollow to Canada.
What is it, how does it work?
You get to see some nice pictures
so you can really visualize what it looks like.
The second part is going into
a toolkit that we've developed.
This is not the first time we've presented
about this program to other groups,
and we've had a lot of feedback from other people
saying, "We kinda like the idea of this.
How do we do this in our own community?"
So the second part is presenting a toolkit
that we have developed.
It's online, you can access it at home.
You can go through it,
you can replicate any aspect of this program
that you would like.
And the third part is really
where we will workshop it with you all
thinking about problems that you've seen
or communities that you think could benefit
from a program like this.
And really digging into how do we adapt
what Cold Hollow to Canada has done for a different setting,
with a different audience, in a different location.
Sound good?
All right.
Since we do have an hour and a half together,
I would love to introduce everybody here.
I don't wanna take...
There are a lot of people,
I don't wanna take too much time,
but I'd also really like to just know who's in the room.
So I mentioned, I'm Monica Przyperhart.
I do work with Cold Hollow to Canada.
I have been running the Woodlots Program,
in conjunction with some other people,
our board members, for a while now.
I also live down in Addison County in Middlebury,
and so I have a few hats here.
As we go around the room, though,
I'd love to hear who you are,
a location, a place that is important to you,
perhaps where you work,
and maybe some kind of a challenge
that a forest is having
that you think could involve landowners in the solution.
I'm going to actually ask you to think about this.
Sound good?
A place that's meaningful to you,
and a really quick, like,
what is a problem that involves landowners?
You ready, go ahead.
I'm gonna close this just 'cause it's finished, yeah.
Hi everybody, I'm Gus Goodwin.
I work at the Nature Conservancy based out of Montpelier.
Hope I'm not setting a bad precedent
by picking a favorite place that's outside of Vermont, but-
[Monica] That's okay.
Johnsburg Valley, Adirondack,
it's my favorite place on Earth.
And the challenge I'd love to see landowners
be more engaged in is adding wood to small streams
as part of routine forest maintenance and management.
[Monica] Great, you wanna go next?
Sure, hello, I'm Mary Perchlik.
I'm an AmeriCorps member
at Vermont Natural Resources Council.
I'm from Marshfield, Vermont,
so some of those woods are my favorite.
One issue, I guess, would be erosion for water quality.
(door knocking)
(attendees murmuring)
[Monica] It's kinda noisy, so we closed it.
I'm Audrey, I'm also an AmeriCorps member,
but I'm at the Middlebury Land Trust,
or Middlebury Aerial Land Trust.
And also a student at Middlebury College
with Professor (indistinct).
So I guess Middlebury area is important to me.
And I guess just working in land conservation
and management this year and private conservation easement
and implementing those in the best way possible.
Great, thank you.
For those just coming in, we're quickly giving who you are,
a place that's meaningful for you,
and a problem in that place
has to do with public or private land.
Go ahead.
[Nancy] I'm Nancy Borheiz,
I'm with the FEMC, I'm the web and database developer.
A place that's important to me
is a piece of conservation land near me,
like just a community lot.
And the problem, I think,
is that it's overused, like recreation.
So I constantly want somebody to get some funding and build,
shore up the trails and make it so it will last for longer.
[Monica] Okay.
[Carl] I'm Carl Hawkin.
I am a ecosystem services staff officer,
currently on the Green Mountain
Finger Lakes National Forest.
I'm on a detail there until the end of January.
But my full-time job is with state and private forestry
with the US Forest Service,
where I'm a watershed forester,
working on state and private lands
across New England and New York
to help improve water quality.
The place that I really like to hang out at
is a woodlot that I own in Central Maine up near Moxie Falls
where I'm trying to encourage my neighboring landowners
to actually do some civil cultural treatments.
They're afraid of what it might look like
if they do something.
I'm talking 'em into maybe pooling our resources together,
much like you do here,
to get more value for an entry of civil cultural practice.
[Monica] Great, sounds like we have a toolkit
to help you out here!
[Carl] Yeah, it's challenge.
[Connie] Okay, my name is Connie Carpenter
and I work in the US Forest Service
out of Durham, New Hampshire.
I'm the field representative, and along with Carl,
we cover the six New England states and New York.
And I've been trying to get people...
I was heavily involved in ecological classification mapping,
and one of the levels is a landscape level
that I've always seen is key
to getting people to understand
that in common ecosystem types,
there's common opportunities, and risks,
and ways to protect the soil and the forest.
And so I'm really excited to see this.
I grew up on a farm, and we had wetlands, and woods,
and farmland or whatever.
And mom and dad's farm is still one of my favorite places.
(Connie laughing)
[Monica] Yeah, thank you, makes sense.
[Andrew] My name is Andrew Hirsch.
I'm a forestry specialist
for Vermont Forest Parks and Recreation.
So before I was in this position,
I was actually doing consulting forestry
up in Northern Vermont.
And something that was of interest to me,
I guess a special place in this instance,
would be Lamoille County and the surrounding counties
would be to get neighboring landowners
to adopt their neighbors' management plans
to be able to have that congruency across the landscape.
And that was kinda what I was invested in thinking about.
[Joel] My name is Joel Zavala.
I work with Forest Parks and Recreation.
An easement monitoring specialist.
I work with Forest Legacy program.
And right now, oh, favorite place, I don't know,
I'm still trying to figure that out in the Vermont sense,
but West Virginia always has a special place in my heart.
Right now, I feel like my biggest challenge
is trying to get everyone on the same page
and having a clear process for management
so that everyone has a clear understanding
of what's going on.
And then really interested
in developing a recreation toolkit for private landowners.
[Monica] All right, sounds good, great.
[Nancy] I'm Nancy Patch,
I'm co-founder of Cold Hollow to Canada,
so we're here to talk about that.
I'm also the Franklin Grand Isle County Forester
for Vermont Department of Forest and Parks.
My favorite place is there, Cold Hollow to Canada.
(Nancy laughing)
And our mission is to conserve 23,000 acres by 2030.
And so that's where I'm finding the work
that we're doing right now is the most important piece.
And this is one way to get to there.
[Monica] Yeah, go there in a minute.
[Ethan] I'm Ethan Tapper.
I'm the Chittenden County Forester
for the Vermont Department of Forest Parks and Recreation.
My favorite place is my land in Bolton,
it's just called Bear Island.
I deal with private landowners a lot, as does Nancy,
as do many of us probably.
I'm just interested in helping them build
connected, protected landscapes.
[Donna] I'm Donna Wolf.
I'm a web and database developer with the MEMC.
I live in the city right down the street,
and my favorite place is Centennial Woods.
I go every single day, I go around multiple times a day,
and there has been a flood
because of some beavers in the last few years.
And the university uses that as a research forest,
so they put a sign like,
"Sorry, trail not maintained.
Too bad, goodbye."
And then the guy that kinda lives there
has just been like hauling cinder blocks and bridges,
and like, this guy out of the goodness of his heart,
has kept the trails passable for us.
So I don't know who's in charge of this stuff,
but that's my concern.
I would like to use my trails.
[David] Well, I'm David Brynn,
I'm the founder and director of Vermont in the Forest.
We've been in the business for about 26 years.
We have 200 landowners
and about 20,000 acres that we work on.
And we do a bunch of other stuff.
And the biggest thing that I would like to accomplish,
help our landowners accomplish,
is get them to quit looking at us.
We need to help them do certain things
and get them to create value-adding forest products co-op.
[Monica] Let's bring that one back in later.
Sounds like a good workshop, go ahead.
[Marie] Hi, I'm Marie Rhodes.
I am with AmeriCorps working at Mass Audubon
at the Arcadia Sanctuary.
And I'm helping them to develop the...
Just flew right outta my head.
I'm nervous, I'm sorry.
(participants laughing)
Forest Resilience Monitoring program
and that I guess would be like my biggest goal there
is to help them develop the protocols for that
before my 11th month is up there, so.
[Andrew] I'm Andrew Randez,
I'm a forest ecologist
with the Audubon Climate Smart Forestry program.
So working with Maria in part.
And a special place to me,
I did my master's work on the Shanko Ridge
and Hudson Valley, New York, and Omaha Preserve.
And so I'm always gonna love that place.
But I guess more related to my work,
I get a challenge with like private land owners.
We're building this Forest Resilience program
and we're piloting it in northwestern Massachusetts.
And basically provide assistance and support
around climate-smart forestry
as well as incentive payments for that.
And I guess a challenge
when you talk about climate and forestry
is like this carbon versus adaptation,
and cutting trees, and ecosystem tradeoffs.
And I guess an issue around that is just like trust
and how to like foster that trust.
So people are, you know...
(participants laughing)
[Sam] Sam Aaron.
I'm a forester at the Northwood Stewardship Center
based near Island on the Pond.
That is a very special place to me.
Another special place is Wilton State Forest
near my home in Newark.
We're talking private lands today.
Northwoods does a lot of landowner outreach,
very much following a Cold Hollow model.
And in that I would say one of the challenges
that's really interesting to me
is the interaction with outdoor recreation,
especially public recreation, with logical values.
And then to me, the layer of making that work
with current use is another challenge on top of it all.
[Devin] I'm Devin Penner,
I'm a forestry outreach coordinator at Northwoods.
I work with Sam and yeah, work with landowners...
(drowned out by airplane engine)
The last one, a special place to me
is near my home in like the Northern Green Mountains.
Northern Oil County.
I've been living there for about a year,
so it's been cool to get to know it, see it and all.
And really enjoying that.
Coming from out west, I think the private land ownership
of a state that is so largely comprised of forests,
but it's, yeah, so many small parcels,
and having more of my work history be on public lands,
programs like this, don't think that's so much a challenge,
but this is why I'm interested in this and being here
is how do we create this is collaboration
and get landowners on the same page.
[Monica] Awesome, all right.
[Kelly] I'm Kelly Gearman.
I'm a conservation director
for Farm and Wilderness Conservation.
So we have about 4,800 acres private land owner,
several conservation easements.
Our sibling organization, Farm Wilderness,
is a summer camp organization around for a long time.
So I do everything from just general land management,
admin and education, and outreach, data collection.
So lots of different things.
Favorite place is probably, or one of my favorite places,
my own backyard, Modest Bend area.
Right around there, all that town.
-The outlet? -Yeah, are you-
[Kelly] And I would say challenge right now is managing,
very similar to other folks, stakeholder expectations,
especially when developing recreational priorities
and when they don't align with ecological...
[Participant] No, I'm going upstairs.
[Noelle] I'm Noelle, as well.
I'm a conservation intern at Northwoods Conservation.
So working on a lot of same things.
Maybe more specific, (indistinct) mapping.
Education regarding that.
Community science and having to be more like...
I think decently informed and yeah,
and just special place probably be Plymouth, Vermont.
[Monica] Thank you.
[Fras] I'm Fras Renfrew.
I'm with the Vermont Fish Wildlife Department.
I'm the program manager of the Wildlife Diversity Program.
My special place is actually a cliff in New Hampshire
that I had an amazing summer.
It represents a peaceful distance to me,
but it was 30 years ago.
And now my special place is anywhere
in the Montpelier area, I guess.
And I've heard a lot of ideas already
that I was thinking of and I don't wanna repeat.
I love what you said about trust.
I think I give a lot to trust.
But what's on my mind often
is somehow a more coordinated approach to invasives
at the community level that's effective and coordinated.
[Monica] Okay, and final back row here.
[Dan] I'm Dan Wright.
I work for the Carbon Conservation Recreation Mess,
I'm a research coordinator there.
And I'm not sure how applicable
this workshop is to my work responsibilities,
but I greatly enjoy hunting out some private property.
I'd like to get better at engaging
(drowned out by murmuring)
Working with private landowners.
[Will] Hi, Will Elder,
habitat biologist with Mount Fish and Wildlife Department.
And yeah, I can't pick one special place in Vermont.
I like 'em all.
But I'm working with installation and land-based program
to develop a streamlined program,
which gets private landowners
trying to encourage them to protect and restore
forest and recreation areas.
So there's a lot of overlap
with what we're talking about here.
[Monica] Great, thank you.
[Joanne] Hi, I'm Joanne Garden.
I am an affirmative forester
with the Vermont Urban Forestry Program.
And I do a lot of the technical community help
with everyone all around the scene.
Favorite place for me would probably be a part
of the Callas Town Forest, Bliss Pond.
And I actually don't know a lot about how it's managed
or who manages it beyond the municipality,
which is maybe why it's so relaxing to be there.
(participants laughing)
But I would definitely agree with...
A sense of folks needing to manage a resource collectively,
but they're being sometimes resistance
to new people coming on board,
changing the way things have been done
and really working through that to understand
that everyone's got a common vested interest.
Great.
Well thank you, everybody,
for taking that time to share who you are
and also these special places and challenges.
I wanted to start that way,
because my hope is that by the end of this time together,
we can workshop some of those places
and think about how to bring a program like this
to some of those other places,
or to address some of those other challenges,
even if they're a little different.
So I mentioned this to those who were here at the beginning,
but I see this workshop as really being in three pieces.
The first part I'll be describing the Woodlots Program
as it exists in the Cold Hollow to Canada region.
The second part is sharing this toolkit that we have
for adapting this to other places
that really goes into a lot of detail about how we did this,
why we did it, and we really get into the mechanics of it.
And then the third part we'll be thinking
about how to bring it to some of these other challenges.
So I'll start with the Woodlots Program itself.
And actually, I'll start with Cold Hollow to Canada.
We are a very small organization,
but where we came from is really this map.
So many of you have probably worked with or heard of
the Staying Connected Initiative,
or the efforts of Two Countries, One Forest,
that has looked at the Northern Forest as a whole
and identified the six places,
in blue with the yellow arrows,
as places to really focus our efforts
in order to maintain the resilience of this forest.
These are the linkage areas
where they're kinda becoming more fragmented.
And we really need to focus our efforts
of protecting and maintaining
the resilience of these forest areas.
So our vision with Cold Hollow to Canada,
and you can see our little logo here,
we're just one little piece of that...
It's the western side of the Green Mountains,
the Northern Green Mountains.
And our vision is to maintain a resilient
and connected ecosystem across the Northern Forest,
starting with our little bit.
Which is just this seven town region.
We're very small, like I mentioned,
but we work in these towns.
And Cold Hollow to Canada really sees ourselves
as the nexus in this hourglass.
We are the ones who take the resources
available from state agencies,
federal agencies, our partners.
I'll go into more detail
on who those partners are in a little bit.
And we bring them to the people in these communities.
So the towns themselves, the conservation commissions.
And in the case with this program
that I'm going to go into detail about,
it's really the landowners.
Now, the Woodlots Program really came out of this fact
that more than two thirds of Vermont's forest land
is privately owned.
I think everybody in this room is well aware of this.
But maintaining the health of our forests in this region
is therefore really reliant on these many individuals
who each steward just a tiny piece of land
within this region.
And the Woodlands Program really comes out of an idea
of instead of just having everybody working individually,
how can we work together to do more?
How can the landowners themselves work together to do more,
but how do we also keep from just having
isolated efforts with landowners?
What are our ultimate goals?
One of our ultimate goals
is land conservation within our region.
We would really like to have
permanent conservation easements on this land.
It's one goal.
Another goal is to enhance our forest stewardship.
So in the management that landowners do,
how can we implement better forest stewardship
that keeps in mind with changing climate,
that keeps in mind wildlife species and habitat,
that keeps in mind forest resilience.
Another pillar of the work of Cold Hollow to Canada
is really this community empowerment piece.
And the couple of you brought this up in our introductions.
How can we not just get these things accomplished,
but work with people who will then have the knowledge,
and the skills, and the tools, and the resources,
and the desire to implement these tools
towards land conservation and stewardship.
At Cold Hollow to Canada,
there's a phrase that comes up a lot.
If you know Nancy Patch,
you probably have heard her say this before, right Nancy?
That you only see what you know,
you only love what you see,
and you only protect what you love.
And that's really at the heart of this idea,
is how do we help the landowners in our region
to start to see, and start to know,
so that they start to see, and start to love,
and start to protect and work towards that ultimate goal.
So that's really where the Woodlots Program came from.
Is this idea to work with the landowners in our region
to just start helping everybody to see.
The equation works something like this.
We take forest landowners,
and we provide them with peer-engagement opportunities,
and technical assistance,
and wherever possible funding opportunities,
so that we get this conservation and stewardship out of it.
So I'll break that equation down into little bits.
The first part is that peer-engagement piece.
And it works roughly like this.
So we have a group of landowners,
and four times a year, every season, quarterly,
we convene and we have a gathering
that starts with a woods walk.
Now, these wood woods walks are sometimes led
by people at CHC.
So myself, or Nancy is our board member,
and founder of this program and the organization.
So we have some knowledge of forest or natural resources.
So sometimes they're learning from us.
Sometimes we invite in experts,
like this is Bob Hop, who many of you know,
a botanist with Vermont Fish and Wildlife,
who came to one of our Woodlots Programs.
But what I wanna emphasize here
is that landowners are not only learning
the knowledge and skills that we're giving them,
they're also learning from each other.
These programs are held on the lands
of the participating landowners who are all neighbors.
And so it's a chance where they can see the management
and the stewardship that each other are doing.
And so they're learning from us.
There's often a topic of interest,
and they're learning about that topic,
but those casual conversations
that they're having among themselves
are every bit as important as the topic at hand.
Does that make sense?
We also, along with these gatherings,
we almost always end it with a pot luck.
Or if the host is not comfortable having a potluck,
we do something.
We might have a bring your own bag lunch,
or at least end with tea and cookies or something like that.
And this might sound like, eh,
maybe it's just a little extra.
But I really think that that is a key part
of what builds the community around these gatherings.
So groups of landowners.
But that casual time together is when they, I think,
really start to build the trust
and those relationships that are crucial
for the program to be successful.
It's a casual time.
They're sharing their stories.
They're sharing not just
what they're doing on their land, but why.
It's when those personal connections start to be made.
[Participant] I'm sorry I have to go early.
No worries.
The second part is the technical assistance piece.
Now, by technical assistance,
some of that technical assistance
happens at these quarterly gatherings, those wood walks.
When maybe if Nancy's leading one,
then she's the county forester,
but she's also going through somebody's land
and describing what she sees and some ideas that she has.
That's technical assistance.
But the technical assistance goes beyond that as well.
We set all of our programs, I'm just gonna close this door.
It's a little noisy.
So we match up all of our program participants
with a couple of these extra things
that we provide for them.
One is the songbird habitat assessment.
We have a really close partnership with Audubon Vermont,
and Audubon Vermont offers these
throughout the state to private landowners
where a biologist goes out in the woods on private land,
does an assessment of the songbird habitat
that is already present on the land.
That also provides some opportunities
for maybe enhancing that.
But what's really special about these with Woodlots in mind,
Audubon really likes partnering with us
because not only do they report out to the landowners
where the landowners get this physical thing in return,
but then we go out afterwards and we can follow up.
And so Audubon has said
they really like working with a program like ours
where they know that after
they give this report to a landowner,
they know that we'll do something with it.
We will go back, we'll follow up.
Other landowners can learn from each other,
and they can look at not just one property at a time.
They can look at the whole region,
all of the landowners there,
and all of them can think
about the collective wildlife habitat,
songbird habitat that they have.
See where the prime habitat
for a certain species is on one property
that might be lacking on another.
Another thing that we give back to landowners
is a climate change analysis
in conjunction with the Department of Forest Parks and Rec.
And this is something where we take
their existing management plan
and we go through it with an eye
towards adaptation and resilience strategies.
So we're actually identifying things
that are already in their existing management plans
that they're already doing
that help with climate resilience in their forests.
Then we also did this for the whole group
so that they can start to learn,
"Oh, well, there are these other adaptation strategies
that have come out on somebody else's land.
What's that about?"
And they have this peer network
where they can connect with each other
and actually see, "why are you doing it that way?"
Or just know that this is an option.
When possible, we also try to follow
those technical assistance opportunities up
with funding possibilities.
For example, we're kinda drawing to a close now,
but we have an agreement with the NRCS,
Natural Resources Conservation Service.
It's part of their RCPP program.
There's lots of jargon here,
but if you're familiar with it,
or if you're not familiar with it,
it's the Regional Conservation Partnership Program
that basically NRCS, through this agreement,
funnels funding for practices
for implementing forest stewardship practices
directly to landowners.
And so we've been able to connect landowners
with some of the funding that has allowed them
to take those recommendations
and put them into their new forest management plans,
or even get the funding
to implement the practices on the ground.
That's one opportunity.
What you actually see here is a different opportunity
that we just did this summer
in conjunction with Vermont Audubon
and Vermont Youth Conservation Corps.
Where through a grant that Audubon got,
we were able to bring in a VYCC crew
to implement a bird-friendly maple project
at no cost to the landowner.
And so it allows us to really follow through
with the assistance that we're providing them
so that landowners can actually implement these projects.
At Cold Hollow to Canada,
we actually have five separate programs going now.
We started with just one, and over time have expanded
so that we have these five separate groups
that are all interacting with each other.
Now, you might be surprised
that we have five separate groups
instead of just why not just one big group.
But what we have found is that it really matters
for building that community and trust
to have the right size group,
and to have the right geographic boundaries
so that nobody has to go too far
and so that they can really build a community
within that group.
And so in this case,
we think five groups is far better than one
in terms of the success of the program.
So at Cold Hollow to Canada, how have we done?
Have we been successful?
So this is one of those things
that's kind of hard to measure, right?
And I think some of the best measures
are actually the landowners' stories.
Just the fact that landowners
keep coming back to these programs,
and the stories that they tell us.
But I'll also add some metrics here.
We've had over 3000 acres conserved
that I think are really directly relevant to this program.
Forest stewardship.
There's this long list of practices.
Updated forest management plans,
forest songbird habitat development,
invasive species control.
These are those programs, these are some of the...
This is a short list of a longer list
of things that have been funded through that program
I was mentioning earlier.
Of course, forest stewardship
is really hard to measure in this way,
because some of the best management is delayed management,
or some of these other practices
that you're not just going to be able to list here.
But we do think that there's been
quite a bit of enhanced forest management.
There's actually been, with these five programs now,
there's been participation of over a hundred landowners.
Some of those are couples and families.
So it's 67 parcels represented,
or about 25,000 acres in our region,
who have received this kind of education and assistance.
And I think one of the big take home messages for me
is what's really important about this program
is this idea that you can take an idea of a project,
improving songbird habitat,
and then bring people out to one parcel
where that's been implemented.
They can see it.
They can talk to the person who's implemented it.
They're part of the community,
and everybody learns from that.
And so it becomes this cross-boundary management method
instead of each person working in isolation.
So I'm gonna finish up this part about, whoa,
the program for the moment,
but I just wanna thank some funders.
The Landscape Scale Restoration Grant
was one of the first funders.
Thank you, Carl, for that.
Oops, my slide keeps advancing on me.
High Meadows Fund and the Open Space Institute
have also been key for that.
And in just a second here,
I'll take you to the website where we now have a toolkit.
Thinking about, it describes the program,
but also thinks about all of the little details involved
in building a program that you might be able to take.
And I'll just add that that has been funded
by a Vermont Watershed grant.
Thank you, Will, who's also here.
(Monica laughing)
But before I go to the website,
does anybody have questions about the program itself?
How it works?
[Ethan] Maybe this is covered in the toolkit,
but I'd be interested if you could just...
Maybe you could, Nancy, tell us about how it,
just like how it started for you?
[Nancy] Yeah, actually it started...
So our oldest group is about nine years old now.
And so what we did is we started just bringing the ideas
of Two Countries, One Forest and showing people maps.
And we have this thing we call the Cosmic Zoom,
which we take a big picture
and kept bringing it further and further down
to someone's backyard, basically.
And showed them that whatever they did on their property
could influence, basically, a globally-significant forest.
Which that globally-significant forest had a lot to do
with encouraging people.
And so that was our first outreach.
And from that outreach,
we started looking at these individual groups.
And so Eastburg was our first pilot project.
And it really was the eye-opening factor.
It was that people really care about doing something,
and they care about doing something together.
And I think the trust issue
that Monica's gonna go into a bit, is huge.
What we talked about is people wanna do something,
but they don't know what, they don't know where,
they don't know who to trust.
And if you can start working within a community,
that makes a gigantic difference.
I don't know if that's the answer
that you were looking for, Ethan, but that's the beginning.
[Monica] And it's great to have that discussion here.
We can put some things in writing on the toolkit,
but we have people in the room
who have worked on this from the beginning, so.
[Participant] So I just wanna follow up
with another question for Nancy, if it began nine years ago.
Coming from a farming community,
I know that there seems to be
some people that show up and you can identify 'em
when they show up to get information for themselves,
but other people look to them.
So did you start out just advertising workshops
and people showed up and you could identify
those people with interest and leadership capability?
Or did you knock on doors?
[Nancy] Okay, so Monica will go into this in more detail,
but this was one of the real focuses
of the Woodlots group and how we went about it.
It really is, this was an invitation program.
We invited people specifically to come to an event,
and I think we'll talk a little more-
[Monica] Yeah, I think we'll talk about that.
But maybe since we brought it up,
it's a good place to start.
It's an important piece of this,
where this isn't just publicly advertised for everybody.
[Nancy] And so there's a great deal
of institutional knowledge.
I grew up in this area, I'm the county forester.
I was a consulting forester,
so I know a lot of people.
And look at the other co-founder, it's Charlie Hancock,
and he's the consulting forester there now.
We just knew, we know people.
And I have information from the department.
The Department of Forest and Parks
is an incredible supporter of this project
and have given me lots of support in moving forward.
So I have the information looking at land ownership,
size of a parcel.
We really didn't open this up to anybody that owns land.
It's really was about 50 acres of woodland
was sort of our minimum
so that we could really talk about management.
And so there was an acreage,
there was a knowledge of the landowners.
Landowners that we knew.
We don't want detractors at our first gatherings,
and it was really important not to have detractors.
And so that was one of the things that's always,
knowing who people were and inviting those folks.
And we would send out,
basically it would happen almost every time
with all five of these programs,
we'd invite 50 landowners
and 25 landowners would respond with positive response.
So it was almost always a 50% response.
It was pretty interesting.
But that's only after a lot of work
getting to know the community in advance.
I think that's-
[Nancy] Right, and every single town is different.
And they have their own personality,
and these Woodlots programs are by town.
And again, Monica's gonna talk a little bit more about that,
but there were a couple of towns that took a while
before we actually developed something.
[Participant] Well done, thank you.
Yeah, so I'll just introduce the toolkit,
and here's the thing about a toolkit.
The toolkit is there.
You can go to the website, you can read it,
and there's a lot of language.
There are a lot of stories to read on the website.
So I don't wanna spend a lot of time
reading those together now,
'cause you can do that on your own time.
But what I would like to do is introduce you
to where to find everything,
introduce you to what material you would go here to find,
and then we can move into this more workshopping piece
of what we're doing where we can go into really in-depth.
If you were to start a Woodlots program
or something similar in your area, how would you start it?
What would you need to think about?
What would you need to change?
Sound good?
So I'll just kinda go through what's here.
So the Woodlots Toolkit is online.
You can see this, it has its own website.
If you can't remember
the woodlots-toolkit.coldhollowtocanada.org,
but you can remember the coldhollowtocanada.org,
you can also get there from our main site.
But Woodlots Toolkit.
The way that this toolkit is structured
is you start out by you can read about the Woodlots program.
Again, I'm not going to go through all of this,
because a lot of this is the information I just gave you.
But you can think about Woodlots in a nutshell.
And then you can go through our goals,
stewardship, and conservation, and more.
You can see about the strategy of peer engagement,
which is really about building trust and building community.
You can think about this technical assistance piece,
learning and implementing stewardship.
And you can learn more
about our funding for land stewardship.
That is all here, and I won't go into it now.
But if you wanna consider a program for your own area,
you can go into this getting started piece.
Is it for you?
Think about whether you do have similar goals.
And then if you are ready to get started,
then this toolkit has a few places to start.
What we really encourage you to do
is first start by thinking about your place.
Think about the people in that place.
And then when you're ready,
then there's actually a step-by-step guide,
I'll actually go there first,
let's just a step-by-step guide to get to know...
"Step one, getting to know your community,"
and you can think about what you can do
in order to implement a program like this.
I'm actually gonna back up and think about the place.
So one thing that I think I do wanna emphasize now
is that this place really matters.
That the message, when we started this Woodlots program,
the idea is that what happens
in this place that we can define, it matters.
And so I think in terms
of making a successful program elsewhere,
that's really the place to start.
Why does that place matter?
Come up with some a message,
because that's ultimately what you will want landowners
in your area to know.
Why does it matter?
Why does it matter what I do right here?
That's what's gonna connect people.
The other reason that geography matters,
that is in this section somewhere,
is that it needs to be a size...
It needs to be a size that that works.
So in our communities, so we have seven towns in our region,
we have five programs.
The first three of those are town-by-town based programs.
One town.
And I think what we would find is
if we were to hold a gathering one town over
that a lot of those people
from the first town wouldn't come.
In the towns that we have divided,
we've combined two towns into one program.
I'd say one of them is brand new,
we don't really have a success story yet,
because this fall was the first time
we implemented the program there.
But the one that's been going on
for about a year and a half now, I find really interesting.
We thought that in order to really have
the right size population to maintain a Woodlots program,
we would need to combine two neighboring towns.
One of those towns could probably have had
its own Woodlots program,
but the other would just have a few strangling numbers,
so we lump them together.
I find it really interesting
that when we hold them in Bakersfield,
people from Bakersfield come.
When we hold them in Fletcher, people from Fletcher come.
And there's a little crossover,
but even just with that very short distance away,
it really limits who will come.
So that geography really matters.
The next piece, is people.
Again, you can read all of these on your own time.
So we've gone into detail
about the landowners and program leadership,
the partner organizations that we work with,
the practitioners.
I'm gonna go into more detail right now
about the landowners and thinking about how many.
Like, how many landowners would be ideal for a program?
And this is, again, you can read more about it,
but it really matters that there are,
we think between about 10 parcels
enrolled in the program and 20.
Our smallest program dips below that sometimes,
and it does sometimes make it hard for landowners
who have to continue hosting more often on these.
Sometimes it means it's harder to invite in guest speakers,
or to really justify bringing in guest speakers
when you might end up
with only five people in your audience.
Now, we can go into a lot more detail.
There could be a success story
with just having those five people
and the lessons that they learn.
And if those five people
are going to implement the practices or follow through,
then that's still arguably very important.
But you start thinking about those questions
when you get too low.
If you get above about 20 parcels, and our biggest program,
we regularly have 20 people show up,
and it also makes it a little harder on hosts
because then you have to have a space for everybody.
You have to think about parking.
And you have to think about whether that group of people
can build the same trust in community as a smaller group.
So all of this is in there somewhere, but yeah, Will?
[Will] Is this all based on your experience
with the Woodlots program?
Or is there something like hard science
that you're pulling from for all this?
In terms of these numbers, what I'm giving you right now,
is from experience on our Woodlots program.
Yep.
[Nancy] And I think that's where this toolkit is,
it's not the only way to do it, right?
That this is just an example
that you can morph into a different format, a different way.
-But it is a method. -Yeah, yeah.
[Will] Did you have crossovers
where different Woodlot groups connects with each other?
We do.
And so some of that, I'll get there in a minute,
but some of that would be through our virtual programs.
That really started...
I guess we did a little before the pandemic,
but they've really started in earnest with the pandemic.
But what was interesting about those
is that we could have, say, a guest speaker
who could speak with everybody from all,
at the time, four of our Woodlots programs together.
And there would be a little interaction.
We had different people coming
to some of those virtual programs,
because somebody with young kids
who can't always make it on our Saturday workshops
can get there, too.
Or somebody who was a landowner who lives in another state,
could come to some of those.
There have also been a few programs that have been places
where more than one Woodlots group comes together.
And then more recently, some of our smaller programs,
I always check with the landowner before doing this,
but if it doesn't look like we'll have
a lot of people at one program,
I'll ask the landowner who's hosting,
is it okay to invite some people from the next town over?
And occasionally a few people will come.
So yeah, so more recently they've gotten to know
each other a little bit.
Will?
[Will] Sorry, you mentioned landowners
on most of these events.
Do you ever use like public land, state land,
or anything like that?
[Monica] Yeah, so the town forests have been included
as Woodlots parcels in these.
So that's kinda the one example where we've used public land
and that's true even for...
So we did climate change analyses
and forest bird habitat assessments on those parcels,
and I've included them as a land ownership
so that those town forests in two of our towns
have been included.
Because the goal is really
to work with private landowners and get them engaged,
and empower them to improve their stewardship,
we really haven't met on other public lands.
Is that true, Nancy?
[Nancy] Yeah, absolutely.
[Monica] Because the point is really to see
what each landowner is doing,
and they can rotate through each other's land
and get to know what they're...
That's part of the community building.
Yeah, Connie.
[Connie] Do you have a sense
of what's drawing people to participate?
In other words, is it the bird connection?
Is it because they want to manage
their land for other reasons?
Surveys or...
Yeah, so engagement, how does it work?
Is one of the categories there.
I will say that when I've directly asked
when we've done surveys,
the most popular answer is, "I come for the potlucks."
(participants laughing)
I'm not kidding.
And even the people who will give another great explanation,
and usually the next one is just, "I've learned so much,"
or, "I now know what to do with my woods,"
is is another big one.
Where people say, "Sure, I had a forester before
and I had a forest management plan,
but I didn't really understand it,
or I didn't know why I was doing things."
And they know now.
The funding has been a big one, too.
So there are a couple people who have basically said,
like through the NRCS projects,
there have been some really financially big projects
that were funded that the landowners got for free
because they did road improvement work
on their forest roads, for example.
And they recognize how instrumental that is.
And of course, through the EQUIP program,
even if we hadn't had the RCPP,
this special grant
with Natural Resources Conservation District,
a lot of these are available to landowners,
but a lot of landowners don't know to connect with them.
And so they've been connected
with those other funding sources.
Yeah.
[Participant] Yeah, I think that that peer learning part
is really crucial.
Because I can remember on a couple of occasions
people seeing a management practice
that one landowner put on their land,
and I didn't know you could get money for that.
And no offense, they might not trust a forester
as much as they trust a neighbor.
And they see their neighbors doing it
and getting cost share money to get it done.
And they'll go, "Wow.
The forester said I could do it,
and my friends are doing it, so I'm gonna do it, too."
And that's a lot.
And I think that peer learning, and I'll share,
Carl has been out on a few walks with us,
so he's seen this in person as well.
But I think that community building
is the huge thing about this.
Where it's what people in these communities
then end up doing.
I'll send out the save the date
and I will immediately get responses back from people
who say, "Okay, I've saved the date, I'm coming."
And it's how they connect with people.
Even though they're people
within the same community as one another,
I'm not sure they've thought to talk with one another
about forest management in the past.
That's not what you just naturally run into somebody
in the grocery store and talk about.
And so this has given them
a shared connection with their neighbors,
and it becomes what they connect with each other over.
It's their forest stewardship.
I really think that community building is a huge part of it.
I'll mention this just because Jeff's picture is up here.
This is one of our landowners in one program,
and the story is actually here.
But I think the program personality
is actually a big part of it.
So we mentioned we have these five different programs,
but every single one has its own personality.
And so for example, this person, Jeff Hewitt,
who's pictured here, he's a poet.
He owns land in Enosburg, but he's a poet.
He writes books, he writes poetry.
And over time there has become this tradition
that the Enosburg Woodlands programs end
with Jeff reading one of his poems.
And it's just something that everybody loves,
and it's this cherished moment.
We would never have thought to build that into the program.
But it's something that the program has become on its own
because of the individuals involved.
I think letting the programs each have their own personality
is really important as well.
Letting the landowners themselves steer what happens.
[Nancy] So many people care about their land a great deal
and they don't really know where to go.
And there's this social engagement piece
with their neighbors.
And I think that really is meaningful.
It's not just the county forester showing up
or their consulting lawyers, it's their neighbors.
And I think that's a big difference
between that and just a workshop,
or a gathering, or a informational meeting.
In some cases it's become their social network,
particularly new landowners who don't know anybody
and they come to one of these,
all of a sudden they've got friends.
It's really sometimes lots of love, but-
[Carl] It works.
[Nancy] I works, this is a social gathering.
Ross?
[Ross] Because you probably don't have enough to do yet,
I'm wondering if you find ways of engaging
the non-landowners in the community as well.
So I think that's a really interesting piece.
So this program is really geared towards landowners.
We have landowners, though, who ask,
"Well, I think this other person in the community,
they don't own land,
but I think they would really enjoy it."
They're not invited
if they don't really fit the program requirements.
They're not invited to be a part
of the land of this program.
However, if one of the landowners is coming to us
with that information, we can say,
"Well, when you're hosting,
absolutely invite that person in."
And we've definitely had a lot of community members
who kind of gain...
They get to see the program from that way.
One thing I'll add, though,
is that I think the success of this program
is that it's really just geared towards those landowners
who own forest land and larger amounts of it.
Because that's the connection.
That's what melds them together.
It's different from a community outreach program.
We do other community outreach programs.
[Nancy] We do.
Yes, and that's important to emphasize, too.
We do reach the greater community in other ways.
And these landowners reach
the greater community in other ways.
Because I think that's an important piece of this, too.
These landowners own land,
but they're also community members
in these rural Vermont communities.
Everything that they adopt on their own land
and what they hear, and what they know, and what they see,
they end up sharing with other people as well.
So even if it's not direct,
I do think we end up reaching more people
than just the people in our programs, yeah.
[Participant] When you say you do community outreach.
So the Woodlots program
is just a piece of Cold Hollow to Canada,
which does other stuff, too?
-Yes, yes. -Okay.
[Monica] This is one program.
Yeah, Will.
[Will] I'm sure you're gonna get it into this,
but I'll just ask anyway.
All right, so what does the program look like?
I think you mentioned like three or four events year.
Yep, so it all seems very...
[Will] (indistinct), but I love it.
Yeah, so I'm just gonna show you
how to find this information later,
but then we can go over it, too.
So running a program, we have the Woodlots structure,
which goes into how there's the Woodlots
and the sharing food.
And we do that four times a year.
And then I've also kind of laid out here
the programming over time.
It's up there, but I'll just talk to you here.
So it is, each program does meet four times a year.
It's on the land of one of the participating landowners.
So I'll reach out in advance
and I'll show you where to find this,
but I even have like the checklist of things to do
before each Woodlots gathering that's up here
if anybody finds it useful.
But reaching out to the landowners,
finding somebody to host.
Which I think is harder at the beginning of the program
when people are still like,
"I'm not really sure what this is all about."
Then over time they get really excited about it,
because they realize that, "I get to have a walk
from somebody who knows what's going on in my woods.
They're gonna come to my land and show me about my land."
So then people get really excited to host these.
But I reach out, find a host.
We find a topic, we figure out who's leading it,
and then I just invite the rest of the group.
It's all over email at this point in time.
And yeah, we have a potluck afterwards.
Because it's a potluck after the first couple events,
everybody knows how it works
and it's not a lot to organize at that point.
It's really just some email communications
to invite everybody there.
But at the beginning,
those meetings are really about getting to know the group.
We can share maps, we can share that message
about why this place right here is important
and what you do matters.
We then move into the forest bird habitat assessments where,
for us, this is our method.
You might find something different to do,
but early on in the program
is where we engage with Vermont Audubon.
If you wanna learn more about that,
there's a whole page here
about those forest bird habitat assessments.
There's a sample assessment of what it looks like.
We can link back to their website to learn more.
But every landowner gets one of these.
And then we meet with Audubon
so that they can really describe
at one of these Woodlots blocks
the process that they're going through
and how a landowner should interpret it.
Sometime early on in the program
we also do these climate change analyses.
And once again, you can kind of go through how we do these.
Where we got our methods from.
You can see what a sample analysis looks like.
You can see what the sample group analysis looks like.
And that really is our programming for the first year,
is thinking about those resources
as we go from property to property.
Over time, I think we're more likely
to bring in guest speakers.
I mean, Nancy has led most of them at this point.
Not all of them, but it's, I mean,
any of you who have been out in the woods
with any of your county foresters
know that they are a wealth of information,
and landowners love it.
They just get to go for a walk
with their neighbors in the woods,
and hear neat things and new information about the woods.
[Nancy] I have to say that it is intense.
And so that's one of the things that you have to recognize
and figure out on your own what level you're going to do
if you wanna do something like this.
It's 20 days, 20 weekends a year
if I wanna be at every one of these workshops,
every one of these Woodlot gatherings.
And so the idea is to split that out.
There's board members, there's professionals.
Monica can be there for some of them,
I can be there for some of them.
And this kind of that idea.
Vermont Covers is one of the greatest organizations
we have in state, wonderful outreach program,
but it's a statewide, top-down kinda thing,
and it's always been difficult
to get landowners to stay together.
For us, landowners have stayed together for a decade now.
But it does require that there is someone there
that is that nexus, which is Cold Hollow to Canda,
is this nexus that we are.
So there is a responsibility.
[Monica] Right.
So I was at a workshop recently
with some partner organizations,
San Jose for example, with North Woods.
And we had Audubon, and we had Vermont Covers,
and we had Vermont Youth Conservation Corps.
We had a bunch of groups
that work with landowners throughout the state.
And the discussion got started
about how do we keep landowners engaged?
Instead of just having that first initial contact
where we think, "Oh, there's this landowner
who's really interested in land stewardship of some sort.
How do we move it to the next step
where we reengage them and keep them moving forward?"
And I listened to this discussion and I thought,
we don't have that problem at CHC.
I think this is kind of the solution to that.
Where if you have that,
for anybody who works with landowners
and has that challenge,
I really think this program is the solution to that.
You keep landowners engaged and they want to come back.
But as Nancy mentions, it takes some time.
I think it's a trade off
between reaching lots of people in a really shallow way
with reaching fewer people,
but in a really deep, connected way
where they will move forward.
Yeah.
[Participant] So I'm wondering,
generally if you own like 50 acres of land,
that's a pretty set demographic
and it's generally like a lot of wealth involved.
So I'm wondering how if the goal of the Woodlots Toolkit
is basically just target the land
and focus on the land conservation with a few people,
or if there's anything to reconcile
that you're focusing mostly on like wealthy landowners
and also find other ways...
It's a really good question
and we really are focusing on this one.
I mean, we recognize that there's a particular demographic
that we're working with here.
And I guess what I would say is,
I think there are many other programs, and CHC does some,
including more of our outreach, general outreach efforts,
that are more targeted at other groups.
We're working with landowners who have land
of at least 50 acres.
That's also who we can work with
when we're talking about land conservation in particular.
For a conservation group to conserve land
that's a smaller number of acres, a smaller lot,
is so much cost per acre
that many groups are unwilling to do that.
I think many people in the State of Vermont
and across the whole region really know
that we need to do better at working with other populations
and especially in some connectivity areas
where parcels are smaller.
But at the moment I would say this program
is really working with the structure that we have in place
and the people who do own at least 50 acres of forest land
with the tools that we have available right now.
Yeah.
[Participant] So thinking about this,
I mean, it's amazing program and I wonder if you have any,
have done sort of any digging or data
into the driving implementation
in terms of like practice implementation
versus landowners who maybe just have a stewardship plan,
landowners who participate in this pilot program,
or if you have thoughts about doing that?
And I guess the reason for asking for that is like, yeah,
we've sort of talked about it.
It's like this is intensive and it's a big investment,
and so how do you get people to buy into that?
And the point you raised about you don't have the problem
of having land owners participate is, that's big.
That's part of what we've talked...
Our field ornithologist at Mass Audubon
has done some like analysis of the forests
for the birds program.
Like a lot of people get plans
and then getting them to implementation
is a whole different thing, so.
[Monica] Right, right.
So I think is your initial question about,
about the implementation piece?
Like how many of our engaged landowners have-
[Participant] Yeah, and have you documented
that in any sort of way that's like shareable?
Yeah, so what we have been able to document,
we don't document, or we don't really track everything
that landowners have done.
We do have good data on what landowners have done
that we have helped to fund through these various methods.
So we're missing a lot through that way.
Because anything that's funded by a landowner,
we don't have a record of.
But I will say, it's not on one of my slides here,
of the landowners who have, what did I say?
67 land ownerships involved,
there have been, I think it's 30 something.
So almost half have implemented
stewardship practices of some sort.
That includes updating management plans
with these funding sources.
So I'm not sure if that answers the question,
but it's quite a large number.
And I think having the funding to implement the practices
has been a big part of that.
[Participant] Yeah.
It might be awesome to visually show that on the website.
Like create some graphic.
I think it is there somewhere.
Yeah, just in terms of going through this,
just thinking about our time,
we have about 20 minutes left together.
I can really let you go through
the toolkit itself on your own time.
It's up here, but I'll just show it does have
like program administration and changes over time.
It has program expenses, what we have paid for.
One thing, going back, has funding sources,
connecting landowners with these opportunities.
It has how we've evaluated it, success in the long term.
How is CHC doing?
This is where we've...
32 landowners have received assistance
for incorporating the analyses into forest management plans.
30 additional, well there's some overlap,
but 30 have received assistance
for implementing those practices.
It also has some tips on how you let
a program mature over time when land passes on.
How you advance the content over time.
There's some case studies.
Like I've said, I'm not gonna go
into all of that detail now.
I just wanna kinda let you know this is all here.
But I also think it would be helpful, or I guess I ask you,
would it be helpful to spend the next 15 minutes
really workshopping some of how to bring this
into another geography?
Is that helpful to you all?
[Participant] Yeah.
[Monica] Okay, that's what I was hoping to do.
Maybe for that, go ahead.
[Participant] I just wanted to comment.
I feel like this reminds me that you've been very successful
it sounds like, keeping landowners engaged.
And it reminds me a lot of like watershed associations
and I feel like they have a very visible resource
that they're protecting that keeps 'em together.
And I feel like part of your success
might be building that understanding for people
and the connection that their woodlot
is not an isolated thing.
And letting them see that their woodlot
is part of like something that's bigger.
And it's harder, I think, with forests
because it's not so visible like a lake is.
But I think building that,
speaking to your point about geography,
building that and letting people really see
like I am part of this geographic forest stand area.
[Nancy] Most detected broadleaf forest in the world?
Every one of our woodlot owners (drowned out by crosstalk)
[Participant] And people ask,
"how do you keep people connected?"
I think that's how they're staying connected to this,
is they are seeing that they're not just their own woodlot.
[Monica] Yeah, I think that is a huge piece of that.
Is that I think every one of those landowners
who keeps engaging with us recognizes that,
and there's that story to build from, yeah.
[Participant] Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that.
'Cause Forest Services work
with the New York City watershed program to do just that,
where we've got a watershed education program
in the east of Hudson and in the Catskill watersheds,
and that feeds 9 million people's water in New York City.
We don't have a a woodlots program like this,
but they've developed a website called "My Woodlot,"
which gives landowners a variety
of resource management tools
within that New York City watershed area,
and that's the incentive.
Which, like you said, that geography
really connects people in that way.
-Yeah. -Yeah.
So I'm wondering, we have about 15 minutes left.
I hear there's a lot of good discussion happening here,
so I'm thinking that it might work best
to keep us as a big group.
Does that make sense to everybody?
But maybe if we can pull chairs out
and maybe can we use one example of somebody who would,
if you'd like to bring something like this elsewhere
and we can think about what it would take to adapt
or make this work elsewhere?
Sound good?
Okay.
(participants murmuring)
[Participant] Been splitting a lot of firewood.
(participants laughing)
No, I have a splitter.
That's young man's work, through, right?
There's some chairs in (drowned out by crosstalk)
No, no, no, that's okay, that's okay.
But I'm wondering, does somebody have an example
that you'd like us to workshop?
Thinking about how to take this to a different place.
[Participant] I mean, I haven't actually thought
about doing this, but, well...
Mostly just because it seems like a lot of work.
(participants laughing)
However, my land is on the very southern terminus
of your identified project area, literally bordering it.
And so I have thought about, in relation to this,
expanding a project area from my land
north towards you guys.
And having the next, yeah.
[Participant] And it's also my land is also part
of this Forest Legacy big conservation project in the '90s
called the Chittenden County Uplands Project.
So, yeah, so there's some existing blocks of conserved land.
There's some big blocks of state forest
that you could sort of build off of.
Okay, sounds like a good place to start, right?
If you wanted to take Woodlots, this idea, someplace else.
So if you were to follow the toolkit,
the step one that we would give you
is to really get to know the community first
so that the community understands whoever the entity is
who's going to be to be gathering people together.
So that your first, I feel strongly,
I'll let Nancy answer to this as well,
but I think I feel strongly
that it's maybe less successful if the first thing
people have heard about this project
is just the cold call or the mailed letter
that says, "Hey, there's this project, you're part of it.
Do you wanna come and meet four times a year?
Sign here."
So what we've done is really start with the outreach effort,
outreach and educational efforts.
Now Nancy mentioned that when starting the Woodlots program,
she and other board members at Cold Hollow to Canada
had worked in the region for a long time
prior to the start of those programs.
And I think that was especially true
for the first three of the five programs that we started.
Nancy knew people, she lived in the community.
She was one of the Woodlots landowners
for the very first program that started.
These were her neighbors.
Now, that's not going to be the case
with starting a program like this anywhere, right?
The fourth program that we started
was in two towns where Nancy and other board members
all said, "We don't know this community as well.
We don't have the same relationships.
We haven't built them there."
And so, go ahead.
[Nancy] The fifth one, right?
(indistinct)
Do the others.
Oh yeah, yeah, sorry.
I'm getting it mixed up.
Last one, the last one.
And so we started out by just doing
a community outreach effort
where we had a series of outreach efforts
that were for the general public.
Some of them were very popular.
We had a live animal event
with the Southern Vermont Natural History Museum
that they came and presented
and were pretty far from Marlboro
where the Natural History Museum is.
So this was a new event in this community
that did not have a lot of public outreach events.
We got like 76 people there in this very tiny town
that has a population of about a thousand.
And people there were saying,
"I've never seen this many people in Waterville before.
Where did all these people come from?
Our our town meeting isn't like this!"
And I think it was really helpful
in just getting to know people,
so that when the letter came from Cold Hollow to Canda,
people already had an idea of who we were and what we did.
[Nancy] But we also, coming to your point earlier,
we also had pre-identified leaders from that community
that we knew had relationships with
and asked to spearhead this.
So there were people beyond us that were from the community
that we were able to call on.
In this case, I think I would also be thinking
about like how large a geographic area.
Like you've mentioned,
that there's already like the Chittenden County something.
[Participant] Uplands, yeah.
Yeah, would you wanna, I don't know how big that is.
Like would you want to try to include all of that?
Or would you want be a piece of that?
I think that to me would be an important aspect.
[Participant] I don't remember what your example was,
of, what was it, 10 to 20 landowners?
Yeah, that's a good number.
[Participant] About that, I guess?
And in our example, too,
we sent out letters to more like 40 or 50 landowners,
knowing that only about half would engage.
[Nancy] But you do have a place to start.
Chittenden County Uplands is a known entity, right?
And there are definitely landowners
that have been involved with that for a long time
that know each other in that area.
So it has an organizational structure already to start with.
[Participant] I did a weird thing
when I worked for county land conservation.
[Participant] Chittenden County Uplands Initiative.
[Participant] This is when local newspapers were available
and I came in as a graduate, after graduate,
my first job after graduate.
And I went through the (indistinct) local newspaper.
And the folks that were in the paper
because of 4H and doing things.
I called them up on the phone
and I put together a commission
to talk about farmland preservation.
And so I was there for like two and a half years.
And 10 years later the group was still meeting.
(participant laughing)
The people that stood up in their community
were people I called and I remember the county LCC chair
was like, "Whoa!"
(participant laughing)
I think, yeah.
So I think that brings us to this next piece,
which is we have done this as an invitation-only program.
It's not just publicly advertised that everybody's invited.
It's really looking at maps
of where the important forest blocks are
and who are the landowners within that block.
And I think we initially made lists
that had everybody on them,
but then we've specifically,
we've actually whittled down this list.
And I know this is something that some people question,
but we've really specifically whittled down that list
in some cases by talking to their consulting foresters
about is this somebody who you think
would engage in a program like this.
And really thinking about who are the people
who are the starting...
Where's the starting place for this program?
People who will, who already do care about land management,
who are engaged.
That's gonna be the people we want to start with.
[Participant] Are you telling people
that you're inviting them?
Yes, yeah.
[Participant] Like they're invitation-only-
Yes, they are invited to the Woodlots program.
And that's really intentional.
Because if we're going to build trust between these people,
we need to not have the people who are gonna say like,
"What, land conservation?
No, we don't want any of that around here."
We do want people who don't necessarily all agree
and have the same points of view,
but we don't want somebody
who's gonna tear the program apart from the beginning.
[Participant] But what if that key landowner
who owns the biggest, most valuable block,
is some curmudgeon that doesn't want to talk anybody?
Well, then we'll have to consider.
I think we've been, here's part of it.
Is that they're self-selecting, right?
These programs are self-selecting.
The people who are going to engage, are going to engage,
and the people who don't care are also not going to engage.
[Participant] Choose your battles, then, yeah.
[Nancy] This is a peer-to-peer program.
It's not a conservation program per se.
The Cold Hollow to Canada is a lot of things.
You can go to our website and see this is really specific
to a peer-to-peer learning organization.
And the other thing, just to say,
that every one of these landowners
already has a forest management plan.
They're in the current use program.
So they've been self-selected already
by being in the current use program in Vermont.
So they already have an interest in forest management.
So there's that self-selection,
and then there's the conversations with neighbors, people...
You know, just knowledge.
Knowing that curmudgeon is not...
While maybe conservation is something
that will show up in that landowner's life someday,
peer-to-peer may not be the right place.
Or there's people that are from out of town, right?
They would love to actually be part of it,
and some people are that only come once a year.
So there's also not a requirement
that people come every time, right?
You don't have to show up at every meeting.
[Participant] Get 'em to move.
(participants laughing)
[Nancy] Right, right, no exactly.
[Participant] So you in some way
identify what your area is.
Could be a town, could be something else.
[Nancy] Could be watershed.
[Participant] And then you would pick like 10...
Would you start with like 10 people?
I'm gonna pick 10 landowners.
We have started with more like 40 to 50.
[Participant] And and that's just like
you reach out to that person in some way.
Yep, we reach out to those 40 or 50.
[Participant] And so, here's my big idea.
And reaching out, I think what we've also found,
this was definitely true for this last group,
we mailed letters to those 40 to 50
and we heard back from some.
But when we really reached people
was when we talked to people they knew
who then communicated with them.
Or even the cold calls with the phone calls
got people there more than the letters,
or the phone call followed the followed the letter
so that people really heard.
It wasn't just this random piece of mail that...
[Nancy] And in no place
were we ever entirely unknown, either.
That was really clear.
[Participant] Being a county forester really helps.
We just know everybody.
That's true.
[Nancy] And so inviting your county forester
to be a part of this, even if they're not a big part,
even a small part, is actually really helpful,
because they have a lot of data as well.
And we have a lot of information in our offices.
So it's really helpful
to have the county forester somewhat involved.
The consulting foresters are a really big help, too.
You know, they're the ones that know their clients,
and they can say, "Well, these these guys would be great.
They'd love it."
"No, I don't think this one would."
And that's why it's a starting place, right?
I mean, you can build later.
You can invite the curmudgeon after he finds out
that we're not some crazy group.
And that happens, too.
That they hear about what's going on,
they see what's happening,
and then they might be more amenable.
They may not be the first person to reach out to.
[Participant] I feel like, too,
I don't know if you've said this,
but I feel like when you're contacting people,
being really clear about what your goals are
so that they have a good sense
of what you're asking them for, right?
If you're sort of vague, you know-
[Participant] Their time is valuable.
They're not gonna jump on something like that.
[Participant] I think it's hard for people.
But I think when you go to people
with like a really clear idea,
like this is the geographic area,
this is what we're trying to accomplish
and even with the timeline,
I think that's way easier for people to be able to say like,
sign on to or wanna become about.
[Nancy] And the toolkit has those examples.
All of our letters, everything we've sent.
We've populated that toolkit with everything we've done.
And you can use exactly what we've got
or adapt it to what you have.
Most likely adapt it.
Right, right.
But yeah, and one of the things on that letter
is it actually has the phone numbers or email addresses,
I can't remember what we added,
but for all of our board members.
And so it's not just contact me,
this random person who you don't know.
It's these are people who are also part of your community
who you can talk to about this program.
And sometimes that's where...
[Participant] But you have existing organization
with a board.
We did have a-
[Participant] So you were starting, right?
So you have, is that what you're saying?
You have Cold Hollow to Canada existed, the board,
before you started to do the Woodlots program?
Yeah, but I guess a similar,
if you don't have your own nonprofit
and you're just starting a landowner group,
I'd say the more people you can just get on board,
even if they're not gonna be part of your program,
but if you can get those messages out
through people who know the landowners,
it's much more effective.
[Nancy] Yeah, calling those those leaders up,
finding out who the leaders are, calling up the leaders,
asking them to participate in forming
a steering committee rather than a board, right?
Right, right.
And and I will say, right now we have five groups
and we have talked about how this is a lot of effort.
But it started out as just volunteers.
I mean, Nancy really started this and it was her neighbors,
and she did already know them, but she was a volunteer.
She wasn't doing this as part of,
I guess it was part of Cold Hollow to Canada,
but she was a volunteer board member at the time.
And so I wanna emphasize that we have grown
into a staffed position here,
but it hasn't always been like that.
And that's not necessarily where it needs to start.
[Participant] Let me like big picture this out.
I mean, I guess I'm still trying to figure out
what exactly it is that you're asking landowners to do?
I mean, like I said, I own a lot of land,
so I'm not a forester.
So like, or a lot owner.
What's the action, I guess?
And and where does that come into this whole discussion?
Because I mean, when we were talking about ideas,
there was like, I wrote this in like 20 minutes, but anyway.
So the beauty of this is there's no requirement
for the landowner.
They don't have to do anything, everything is optional.
But we ask them to engage.
We ask them to come to the programs
and we give them opportunities.
So it's not, we're not looking for...
We're not asking them initially
for anything that they give back.
It's really, we're offering this program to them.
[Nancy] But the goal is to enhance forest stewardship
across the Cold Hollow to Canada region,
and also to enhance conservation values of all forms,
as well as getting people to love their land more.
So if they love their land more,
they're gonna be more inclined to protect that land.
And so this is an avenue.
And initially it was started,
initially the goal was an avenue
to get greater amounts of conservation done.
And so the first Woodlots group,
actually at this point now a third of that property
is now permanently conserved in easement.
So that's really long-term success.
But in the meantime,
you're getting great forest management done
and you're getting people to buy into that in a bigger way,
understanding what climate change is.
10 years ago when we started doing climate change analyses,
there were people in our world at that time saying,
"Don't use the words climate change, use something else."
Well, we didn't go there.
We said what it is and people felt empowered
by understanding that they could do something on their land
that would actually affect
climate change adaptation or mitigation.
That they could actually do something where it felt
like there was nothing we could do at that time.
So I think it's empowerment.
It's empowerment, it's trust, it's learning together.
But the ultimate goal
is enhanced forest stewardship and conservation.
[Participant] I have another question, overall questions.
So you mentioned the RCPP program.
Is that available to people
that are in these groups specifically?
Or is that available to everybody
and you're just helping these people in the groups
figure out how to do it?
Right, so I'm actually gonna start
with a different NRCS program.
The EQUIP program really is available to landowners.
And so one method is really just to help landowners
understand what the program offers, what practices EQUIP,
which is available for anybody offers,
and how to get connected with that.
And I think that's the step one of what's really helpful.
The RCPP is something that we as an organization,
as a non-profit apply to as, it's basically like a grant.
And so we got connected to that.
That program, I will say, it's tremendous
in terms of the amount of funding
that's gone directly to landowners.
It's almost $600,000 just in this subject outreach,
which is a lot of funding, that's really significant.
But I will say there's also a huge amount of administration
on the part of organization.
So I would not go that direction
unless you are prepared to do a lot of administration.
[Participant] I just wanted, I'm sorry,
just say it's 4:30.
It's supposed to wrap up at 4:30 if anybody needs,
there's the poster session and the social.
I just wanted...
(participants murmuring)
I think we...
I really appreciate your time here today.
Thank you for coming.
[Participant] Thanks a lot, thank you.
[Nancy] Feel free to reach out to either of us.
[Monica] Yeah, definitely.