The Sustaining Family Forests Initiative is a collaboration organized to gain comprehensive knowledge about family forest owners in the United States. Members of the initiative include government agencies, forest industry companies, conservation organizations, certification systems, landowner groups, and universities. At a minimum, all of these groups agree on the importance of keeping forests as forests and good forest stewardship.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Projects

The SFFI partner organizations work around the country to help protect small family woodlands. Our members have a number of projects to help families maintain their woodlands:


Tools for Engaging Landowners Effectively

The newest tool of the SFFI is the TELE web site, which helps people who are working with small landowners to design an effective communications plan to ensure the sustainable management of family forests - defined here as 1-999 acres.

"Tools for Engaging Landowners Effectively", or TELE, provides templates to help those working with family foresters to design unique communications strategies for working with their clients.


Call Before You Cut

Call Before You Cut (CBYC) was a pilot project to test how to apply SFFI research to landowner outreach programs. The audience for this campaign was woodland owners in six states—West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and Missouri—who own between 10 and 1000 acres of woodland.

Project documents for download:

We aim to provide credible, useful information that will serve as a wide-ranging resource to aid in the development of outreach and services, so that organizations working with family forest owners can be more strategic in meeting education, outreach, and service goals, that will lead to enhanced stewardship of private lands and help keep forests as forests.