1997
On September 12-14, 1997, the CFRF Program held its first collaborative workshop among the CFRF fellows, accompanying community representatives, academic advisors, and a number of forest community resource people. The workshop was held at the MercyCenter in Burlingame, CA, with 23 people in attendance.
Fellows presented and discussed their proposed research and their experiences /work-to-date. Community members presented forest community issues and perspectives. Resource people and academics provided critical feedback, suggestions, lessons from experience etc.
Some highlights from the workshop included: the sharing of community expectations and hopes through having collaborative research relationships and better mutual understanding of both the academic and community requirements and perspectives among all the participants.
1998
The second annual CFRF workshop was held September 10-13, 1998 in Moravia, NY at the CasowascoConferenceCenter with 28 people in attendance. The workshop was co-hosted with the PECM program (Program in Environmental Conflict Management) at Cornell University, NY.
Participants included the CFRF fellows, community representatives, academic advisors, the CFRF steering committee and a pre-dissertation fellow who received EPA funding for his dissertation, but who wanted to attend because of his commitment to community forestry.
PECM’s collaboration made it possible to handle local workshop and logistical needs with a great deal more ease and grace. It also allowed CFRF to combine its workshop with a field trip to a nearby study site. Fellows and community members presented and discussed both their field research and the collaborative challenges and experiences of encouraging researchers and communities to work together.
In addition to the field trip, the workshop involved presentations on the research by each fellow and community person, group discussion of issues, intensive discussion of methods by fellows and faculty, and discussion of the program by community members, coordinators and the steering committee.
1999
The CFRF program’s third annual collaborative workshop (September 23-26, 1999) included CFRF fellows, community practitioners, academic advisors and the CFRF steering committee. There were thirty people in attendance, including one self funded participant: a US Forest Service person who had attended last year’s workshop with her CFRF fellow and had become very excited and enthusiastic about the program. Among our participants we also had two members who were Native American (from the White Mountain Apache in AZ and the Flandreau Santee Sioux tribe in South Dakota). The workshop was held at the Heifer Ranch in Perryville, Arkansas, which is owned and operated by the Heifer Project International. The workshop was co-hosted with assistance from the University of Arkansas’ Cooperative Extension Service. Their collaboration allowed the CFRF to include a field trip in the workshop to a nearby field site to study the role of private forest land ownership in this region.
2000 Workshop at Ghost Ranch
The CFRF Program held its fourth annual workshop from October 4 to 8, 2000, at the GhostRanchConferenceCenter in Abiquíu, New Mexico. Forty people attended the workshop including fellows, academic advisors, community representatives, steering committee members, and several invited guests.
The workshop included an interactive session on community forestry, presentations by the fellows and their community partners, a panel discussion with local community forestry practitioners, a field trip to Truchas, New Mexico, and a training session on participatory methods conducted by Dr. Jacqueline Ashby of the InternationalCenter for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).
The workshop opened with steering committee member Professor John Bliss facilitating a session exploring the major themes in community forestry in the United States. Workshop participants wrote down their ideas concerning the principles, values, and themes of community forestry as well as its opportunities and challenges on index cards and then orally presented these to the entire group. A post-workshop analysis of the ideas presented revealed three major underlying themes:
1) a central goal of community forestry efforts is preserving local ways of life,
2) communities need access to resources to maintain a particular way of life,
3) communities need meaningful participation in decisions affecting the magnitude and direction of economic, social and cultural change.
It is notable that there were relatively few comments dealing specifically with the environment. Evidently the concerns of the CFRF workshop participants were focused on social, economic and political issues.
The three themes were evident throughout the workshop. For example in his presentation on minority issues in community forestry Rodney Stone, Forest Service Liaison at Southern University, noted that there are proportionally fewer minorities in the natural resource professions, that oftentimes there is only token minority representation on advisory boards and that this creates an “illusion of inclusion,” and that agendas for natural resource management do not necessarily include the needs and aspirations of minority communities.
The three themes were evident in the presentations the fellows made as well. All of the presentations dealt with conflict over resource management in local situations to a greater or lesser extent. The extent to which conflict was a theme in the presentations is evident in the number of presentation titles with the word “conflict” in them (see Appendix B). At the core of the conflicts in the case studies were questions of access and participation. In addition, the theme of preserving ways of life ran through many of the presentations and was a central issue in some. For example, the presentation by Jonathan Long (fellow) and Mae Burnett (community partner) on “Design of Restoration Treatments for Riparian Wetlands on the White Mountain Apache Reservation” highlighted the links between riparian restoration and maintenance of traditional cultural values on the White Mountain reservation. Alexandre Mas’ presentation on “Enriching Ecosystem Management in the Northern Forest through Participatory Research with Maple Syrup Producers” illustrated a different, but related, process of maple sugaring being valued more as an integral part of a way of life than as an income-earning economic activity.
In addition to the three broad themes identified, more detailed concerns became apparent during the workshop as well. For example, three main points emerged from a panel discussion with small loggers operating in northern New Mexico: 1) small loggers need technical assistance with all aspects of marketing; 2) they need technical assistance in increasing the value of their products (i.e. producing grade lumber) as well as in maintaining consistent quality in their production; and 3) they need assistance in adjusting to working with small diameter logs.
On Saturday the entire group went on a field trip to Truchas, New Mexico, to view firsthand the thinning work that La Montaña de Truchas, a community-based organization headed by Max Cordova, has been doing on national forest lands. While touring two sites on the national forest, Mr. Cordova addressed the group, explaining the work his organization is doing and how it is helping his community as well as the forest. He pointed out that the thinning work has resulted in increases in wildlife on the lands involved. He also suggested that one value of local community involvement in national forest management is that local community members are providing stewardship services on public lands for the rest of the nation. In his words, “we’re taking care of the land for you.”
After the tour, the group returned to La Montaña’s headquarters for a lunch of traditional New Mexican food. After lunch, several speakers addressed the group. Community activist Santiago Juarez began with a moving presentation about the legacy that speculation in land grants in the late nineteenth century has left for contemporary northern New Mexico communities. This legacy includes a diminished land base, degraded land in many areas, and a keen sense that their lands were stolen among members of many Hispano and Native American communities. Other speakers talked about rural economic development in northern New Mexico, and one spoke about the alienation from the natural world she sees among residents of urban areas.
Perhaps the most memorable talk was that given by local community activists Kay Matthews and Mark Schiller who discussed problems in foundation-funded projects in northern New Mexico. They argued that foundations in general, and the Ford Foundation in particular, frequently fund projects in the region that work at cross purposes to one another. They asserted that many environmental groups whose campaigns often result in actions that prevent local communities from engaging in their traditional livelihood activities are funded by the same foundations that fund community development programs in those same communities. They also argued that often there is a lack of transfer of technical expertise to people in local communities so that funded programs do not build local capacity for managing ongoing projects or for developing and implementing future projects. This presentation stirred some lively discussion and certainly gave the CFRF workshop participants a taste of the politics surrounding land use and resource management issues in northern New Mexico.
On the last morning of the workshop Dr. Jacqueline Ashby of CIAT, an expert in participatory research methods, conducted a training session in participatory action research (PAR). Dr. Ashby outlined the basic principles of PAR and explained the use of three specific field methods: stakeholder analysis, matrix ranking, and forcefield analysis. The session helped to ground many of the methodological issues that had arisen in earlier workshop presentations in concrete concepts and techniques. This was important not only for addressing questions fellows had about their own research, but also for advancing understanding among other workshop participants of the role participatory research plays in advancing community forestry efforts.
The workshop concluded with a special brainstorming session on recruiting under-served students into the CFRF program.
The 2000 CFRF workshop thus accomplished many things. First, it identified common themes across the many case studies presented, and provided illustrations of how these common themes play out through interaction with unique historical and socio-cultural factors in specific local settings. The field trip to Truchas, for example, demonstrated how history shapes contemporary land use and resource management conflict. It also raised difficult questions about possible unintended consequences of foundation funding in local communities.
Second, through the training session on PAR, the workshop advanced the goals of the CFRF program in the area of promoting wider acceptance of participatory research methods in academia.
Third, through the participation of the specially invited guests as “resource people”, the workshop succeeded in expanding networks and in creating additional institutional connections for itself as well as for the fellows and their community partners. One outcome of the networks created during the 2000 workshop was the development of an ongoing working relationship with Eva Harris, a small forest owner from Canyon City, Oregon, who attended the workshop as M.A. Fellow Stefan Bergmann’s community partner. As a result of this working relationship Eva was funded to attend two separate events. One was an interagency (BLM and Forest Service) sponsored workshop which trained participants to meet the requirements of the Endangered Species and Clean Water acts in ways intended to avert conflict and gridlock when implementing ecosystem restoration projects in their communities. Eva was also funded to attend the Rural Sociological Society’s annual meetings in August, 2001, to participate in the panel discussion on community forestry which the program coordinator organized (see below).
Fourth, inviting special guests also had an important impact on the recruitment of fellows. Not only did the guests contribute to the brainstorming session on minority recruitment, but two of them, Ronald Trosper and Rodney Stone, encouraged some minority students to apply for a fellowship during the 2001 competition. Two of these students were ultimately accepted into the program.
Finally, one measure of the success of the workshops is having people, such as Marshall Murphree of the University of Zimbabwe, request to attend the 2001 workshop.
2001 Workshop at Silver Falls State Park, Oregon
The CFRF Program held its fifth annual workshop from October 6 to 9, 2001, at the Silver Falls State Park Conference Center near Sublimity, Oregon. The goals of the workshop were to help develop a broader understanding of the theoretical and substantive issues in community forestry among workshop participants, to provide training in participatory research methods, to provide networking opportunities, and to expand the institutional connections and networks of the CFRF program. That the workshop exceeded its goals was evident in the renewed energy and enthusiasm for community forestry that the participants carried away from the meeting with them.
Forty people attended the workshop including fellows, academic advisors, community representatives, steering committee members, and several invited guests. The latter were invited to expand the geographic reach of the CFRF network, to acquaint students who are likely prospects to become future fellows with the program, as well as to acquaint faculty at historically black colleges, or who otherwise might be likely to have contact with minority and underserved students, with the program. The invited guests included Rory Fraser (Alabama A&M University), Tony Cheng (Colorado State University), John Schelhas (Tuskeegee University), Ajit Krishnaswamy (National Community Forestry Center), Marshall Murphree (University of Zimbabwe), Jefferson Fox (East West Center, Honolulu), Halima O’Neil (student, California State University, Hayward), and Paige Fischer, Christina Kakoyannis, Du Ke, and Adam Wiskind all of whom are students at Oregon State University.
The workshop opened with a half day session on participatory research led by Pam Tau Lee of the Labor Occupational Health Program at the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to leading interactive exercises and discussions on participatory research, Ms. Lee described the participatory research she has conducted with members of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union on occupational health issues of hotel room cleaners. Ms. Lee’s presentation showed how workers can be trained to do research that both meets standards of academic rigor and provides useful information to labor unions for their collective bargaining efforts.
As always, the presentations by the fellows and their community partners were the focal point of the workshop. The 2001 presentations covered the full range of community forestry issues from riparian restoration on tribal lands to the role of a sense of place in mediating environmental conflicts; from the role of race, class and gender in shaping urban forests to issues of migrant laborers in the non-timber forest products industries; from the effects of different tenurial arrangements on harvesting of floral greens to issues in managing private forests across property boundaries on an ecosystem scale.
Recurring themes in the workshop included how to incorporate local knowledge into research, making research meaningful to the community, developing research questions that satisfy academic committees and address community needs and concerns, and the range of methods and approaches that could be considered participatory.
The workshop also included a field trip to a private forestland owner’s land, and an evening fireside group discussion with several members of the Oregon Small Woodland Owners Association. The field trip provided a first-hand view of the kinds of management occurring on the land of Oregon’s nonindustrial forestland owners, and the group discussion provided many insights into the motivations for action and feelings about the land that such forestland owners have.
2002 Workshop
The 6th annual CFRF workshop was held from October 9-12, 2002, at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in Epes, Alabama. The goal of the workshop was to help develop a broader understanding of the theoretical and substantive issues in community forestry and participatory research among workshop participants, to provide networking opportunities, and to expand the institutional connections and networks of the CFRF program. That the workshop exceeded these goals was evident in the renewed energy and enthusiasm for community forestry that the participants carried away from the meeting with them. This enthusiasm was captured in a review of the workshop by a participant who wrote “the Community Forestry Research Fellows Program continues to serve as a key dimension to the growing network of CF practitioners, policy makers and analysts, and researchers in the United States.”
Forty people attended this year’s workshop including many new and returning special guests. The special guests were invited to further expand CFRF networks, to engage professionals and community people in the Southeast in the ongoing dialogue about community forestry and participatory research, and to nurture links to Historically Black Colleges and Universities. They were