Thanks for joining us in Indianapolis this November for two days of collaboration and idea sharing geared toward helping you find new ways to strengthen your own community forest. The Partners in Community Forestry Conference, organized by the National Arbor Day Foundation, brought together foresters and arborists, urban planners, landscape architects, non-profit leaders, parks and recreation managers, academics and many others who are a part of the urban forestry community to collaborate and share ideas to strengthen community forests.
Delta’s Eve Pytel spoke at the conference in a session with Jenny Gulick of Davey Resource Group, and Travis Miller, of the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments (OKI). The participation-based session, “Green Infrastructure & Community Forestry: Creating a Virtuous Cycle that Achieves Meaningful Community Outcomes.”
The session invited attendees to work in groups to discuss the drivers that green infrastructure decision makers consider and ways in which community forestry can play a role in achieving positive outcomes. The attendees looked at this through the lens of different types of practitioners – such as sanitation managers, water quality professionals, and urban planning professionals – as well as communities and scales of tax bodies with the help of newly-created worksheets and guides. Links to session resources are below.
Participants concluded that:
- Being inclusive creates better projects,
- Green infrastructure requires a multidisciplinary team, and
- By setting up inclusive processes, we can create better long term solutions.
Session Resources:
- Presentation: Green Infrastructure & Community Forestry: Creating a Virtuous Cycle
- Tool guide: Green Infrastructure Helpful Tools
- Blank worksheet: Green Infrastructure: Creating a Virtuous Cycle that Achieves Meaningful Community Outcomes. Coordinating Multiple Stakeholders with Distinct Goals
- Sample completed worksheet: Green Infrastructure: Creating a Virtuous Cycle that Achieves Meaningful Community Outcomes. Coordinating Multiple Stakeholders with Distinct Goals