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The Sierra Institute (then Forest Community Research) began in 1993, working out of a small office in a winery in Westwood, California, and became a non-profit organization in 1997. The organization relocated to the rural Northern Sierra Nevada town of Taylorsville, California (population 154), where it remains today. In 2005, Forest Community Research changed its name to the Sierra Institute for Community and Environment to reflect the diversity of its work.

Bringing rural voices to national policy From the beginning, the Sierra Institute has been bringing rural people’s voices into national research and policy discussions about natural resource management and how it relates to community wellbeing. In 1993, the Sierra Institute participated in President Clinton’s Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team (FEMAT) and guided the assessment of forest-based communities and their capacity – a community’s ability to respond to external and internal stresses, to create and take advantage of opportunities, and to meet the needs of residents. Following FEMAT, the Sierra Institute convened community-based groups and invited national policymakers to meet with them to make recommendations about how to advance adaptive resource management and how to work effectively with communities, particularly with respect to the President’s Northwest Forest Plan (the “spotted owl” plan). These meetings were catalysts for engaging rural people in future research and policy work, and forming the Lead Partnership Group.

A laboratory of community collaboration: the Lead Partnership Group From 1993 to 2003, the Sierra Institute convened the Lead Partnership Group (LPG), a collaboration of 15 watershed and community forestry groups from Southern Oregon and Northern California. The LPG brought together representatives of environmental groups, timber industry, and rural residents. The group emphasized collaborative principles and equitable processes to help break through the gridlock and conflict that enveloped natural resource policy and decision-making, and halted work on the land. In preparation for bringing environmental and timber interests together for a two-day conference with community groups in 1995, the LPG spent a year turning group ideas into papers which became core themes in community-based resource management – all-party monitoring, participatory public processes, reinvestment in rural places, and stewardship. Then we garnered funds to pilot these ideas in projects on the ground. The LPG was truly a laboratory for developing and testing out principles for collaboration and community-based natural resource management.

Assessing community capacity to respond to changing rural economies During the 1990s, the Sierra Institute pioneered innovative methods to understand and evaluate community capacity and impacts of disasters and resource management decisions on rural communities. Between 1995 and 1997, the Institute led the social assessment of 180 communities for the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (SNEP), involving local experts – the residents – in the process. The Institute also led the SNEP public involvement process in which, for the first time in a large-scale ecosystem study, the public worked with team scientists, both learning from and contributing to the knowledge of the study. In 1997, the Institute conducted the first social science assessment for the National Park Service, evaluating the social impact on nearby communities and institutional responses to the flood of 1997 when Yosemite National Park closed for two months. The Institute conducted a social assessment for the US Forest Service of 130 communities in the contentious Klamath region to inform resource management and decision-making. Several years after the Northwest Forest Plan was instated, dramatically reducing the timber cut, the Sierra Institute evaluated outcomes and lessons of the President’s $1.2 billion economic companion plan – the Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative - meant to off-set impacts to rural communities and help them transition away from their long reliance on the timber industry. These studies brought rural people into the research process and into discussions of natural resource and community development policy that affect their lives and livelihoods.

Re-visioning an Environment-Community Relationship In 1999, the Sierra Institute convened a series of intimate dialogues with some of the “giants” of urban and land-based environmentalism—

• David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club, founder of Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute.
  
• Wendell Berry, Kentucky farmer, essayist, poet, conservationist
  
• Carl Anthony, environmental justice luminary, Ford Foundation officer, co-founder of Urban Habitat
  
• Wes Jackson, sustainable agriculture pioneer, co-founder of the Land Institute
  
• Martha Davis, Inland Empire Utility Agency, former Executive Director of the Mono Lake Committee

—to explore how to sustain the relationships of urban, suburban, and rural people to working and wild landscapes. Four problem statements came out of those dialogues:

1. The global market and market forces continue to destroy land and community, and people’s relationship to place.
2. People in cities often do not understand how they are connected systematically, ecologically, and economically to natural resources.
3. People working the land do not receive an equitable or just compensation for the food, forest products, and other resources they produce.
4. The lack of viable, healthful local land-based economies results in the abuse of land, forest, and other resources.

These problem statements continue to shape the Sierra Institute’s research, education, and community work to this day.

Making room at the table: Pacific West Community Forestry Center
These dialogues began to give voice to rural people and organizations, but where were the many people working in the forest – Southeast Asian mushroom harvesters, immigrant Latino forest and forest product workers, Native American communities – whose voices weren’t being heard? From 2000 to 2004, the Sierra Institute hosted the Pacific West Community Forestry Center, part of a national pilot project, and focused our efforts on partnerships with underserved communities in forestry. We used participatory research to help communities identify and address issues important to their wellbeing and livelihoods, and the forests on which they depend. While the Pacific West Center is no longer active, we continue our work with underserved communities through participatory research, education, and practice. To learn more about this innovative project, click here.

Local roots, national vision Since 2004, the Sierra Institute has been bringing our research, education, and community collaboration skills home to Plumas County and to a growing diversity of challenges rural communities face. Whether it’s coordinating the citizen-based Almanor Basin Watershed Advisory Committee, leading educational tours of cutting-edge watershed and forest restoration projects, helping teachers develop natural resources curriculum, building capacity to improve healthcare access with the county’s growing Latino community and to strengthen the viability of the local healthcare system, the Sierra Institute practices our mission at home. At the same time, with the 2006 release of our national study of the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, we continue to inform policy debates at the national level that affect communities like the one where we live, work, and play.

Learn more about our current projects and how you can support our work for
sustainable ecosystems and healthy rural communities.