United States Endowment for Forestry and Communities

See schedule o for statement of program service accomplishments:the Endowment advances its mission using a "theory of change" that focuses on three areas: retaining and restoring healthy working forests; promoting and capturing multiple value streams using market-based tools; and enhancing community capacity, collaboration, and leadership. The Endowment deploys its work through five primary initiatives, each of which supports several programs or projects. I. ecosystem markets: monetizing non-traditional forest products. The healthy watershed through healthy forests program connects downstream water consumers with upstream forest owners with the intent to advance overall watershed health and quality by ensuring working forest retention. Much of this work is jointly funded in partnership with the usda natural resources conservation service (nrcs) and the environmental protection agency (epa). We continue nationwide collaboration with the american water works association, which represents water utilities and the water community.ii. Forest retention and health: retaining/expanding and ensuring health of forests. This is a wide-ranging initiative that includes serving as cross-border convener for more strategic collaboration between canada and the u.s. to date we hosted five canada/us forest health and innovation summits roughly on a biennial basis. Other work includes keeping forests, the department of defense's base buffering program, and innovative financing approaches for forest management and retention. Each is designed to aid in retention and restoration of healthy working forests. Iii. Traditional markets: after successful work that led to the creation of two commodity check-offs softwood lumber board and paper & paper-based packaging board -- more recent work has included supporting initiatives to advance public understanding of the benefits of working forests and the role they play in climate solutions. We are continuing to develop blockchain solutions through a program called forestrust, which seeks to track the supply chain of timber and forest products from forests to end-product, which helps alleviate issues involving illegal logging. Iv. Future markets: the Endowment is partnering with the usda forest service and emerging producers to advance commercialization of cellulosic nanomaterials. This multi-year initiative engages partners to fill knowledge gaps facilitating new products and applications while placing a primary interest on ensuring human and environmental health and safety. Work continues to advance mass timber applications to support tall wooden buildings, including advancing the carbon story of forest products. The greatest success to date was achieved in concert with the softwood lumber board and american wood council as efforts to modernize building codes were achieved that will allow construction of mass timber buildings up to 18 stories from the previous 6-story limit. Additionally, we are working to develop markets for small diameter, dying and dead trees to enhance forest health while advancing family-supporting jobs in rural Communities. Through partnership with the usda forest service, we are concentrating our work on commercializing torrefaction to provide a robust new market for fuels that could yield green energy. Building on tests of torrefied pellets completed in a coal-fired facility, the torrefaction facility is nearly set to begin round-the-clock production of commercial-scale torrefied material and other high carbon content products like biochar.v. Asset creation: we continue to support the sustainable Forestry and land retention (sflr) network and their goal to use forests and forest-based assets to create economic opportunity for african american landowners. American forest foundation is now the sflr fiscal agent. Sflr is a multi-year program in partnership with the usda forest service and nrcs across eight southern States and has successfully seen 1,500 black families move their lands into the forest management pipeline. We are applying the applied learnings for our work with the sflr network to explore hispanic/latino landowners and their ability to generate wealth for their families and Communities. We continue to work with the economic development administration in new england in partnership with the northern forest center to assist in finding local economic solutions to help offset the impact of the closure of much of the region's pulp and paper production.