Welcome to the Pacific West Community Forestry Center! We help rural communities and forest workers use and build local knowledge, assets, and resources to investigate issues they identify as important. We do this by:
- working with rural and forest worker communities to gather and produce information so that they can participate in decisions that affect their forests and livelihoods
- building relationships to share knowledge among forest communities, scientists, and other stakeholders in the forest
- building capacity with communities to develop their own strategies for investigating and addressing important human and ecosystem issues
Our Approach
We believe that people know what issues and problems their communities face, and that they have a wealth of knowledge they can use to develop their own community-based solutions. The Pacific West Center uses a process called "participatory research" to help rural and forest worker communities identify ways to address forestry problems through research, technical assistance, information sharing, and dialogue. We work to build "civic science" partnerships, where the practitioner knowledge of communities comes together on equal terms with the knowledge of scientists and forest managers to investigate community-identified issues. This blending of knowledge helps bring community results, and broadens our understanding of the complexities of ecological, social, and cultural sustainability.
The Pacific West Center is hosted by Sierra Institute for Community and Environment in Taylorsville, California.
Program funded by the Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service, United States Department of Agriculture under Agreement 99-36200-8704. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed on this Web site are those of the NCFC and do not necessarily reflect the view of the United States Department of Agriculture.
Copyright 2003 Pacific West Community Forestry Center. All rights reserved.
