MISSION

NNRG is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. We strengthen the ecological and economic vitality of Northwest forests and communities by connecting people with the knowledge, skills, and resources they need to steward their land.

APPROACH

NNRG is a think-learn-and-do tank of ecological forestry. We advance the state of knowledge about ecological forestry, spread the word about its benefits and feasibility, and help landowners put it into practice on their own forests.

Operating primarily in western Washington and Oregon, we focus on forests owned and managed by private landowners, smaller forest product companies, governmental agencies, Indian tribes, and non-profit organizations. Ecological forestry (defined in more detail here) is an approach that mimics natural processes wherever possible and treats the forest as a whole system.

our LONG-RANGE GOAL

We envision a future in which ecological forestry and its support for local communities and economies becomes the standard approach for managing nonindustrial forestland in the Pacific Northwest.

WHAT WE DO

Through our programs, we work to achieve three primary objectives:

1. Provide access to the tools and information that landowners need to sustainably manage their forest.
2. Improve the economics of sustainable forest management so that all landowners can secure the financial resources to steward their land, and consumers can support ecological forestry with their purchases.
3. Empower communities of forest owners and businesses to work together and champion the cause of ecological forestry.

Through this work we aim to:

Spread the word about ecological forestry

Through workshops, conference presentations, our book, and our extensive online library of other resources, we help forest owners and managers see the potential in applying ecological forestry to their lands.

Deepen our understanding of ecological forestry

We work with partners across the region on research projects from the economics of thinning to forest adaptation to climate change. Our goal is to ground-truth forestry science to provide local landowners with the best and most up-to-date advice for how to manage forested lands amid changes to our collective economic, ecological, and community landscapes.

Find out more by exploring our project pages on climate adaptation, ecological forestry, management planning, and more.

Help landowners take care of their forests

Whether you’ve just acquired your forestland and need to draw up a management plan, or you’re preparing to harvest some of your timber, NNRG can help. We have a team of seasoned foresters who will work with you and your forestland to attain your economic, ecological, and social goals. Our services also include reforestation, forest inventory, and timber appraisals.

Offer the Forest Stewardship Council® seal of approval

NNRG holds a group certificate from the Forest Stewardship Council, the most rigorous and credible forest certification system in the world. More than 80 forests covering 190,000 acres in Oregon and Washington meet the FSC’s exacting standards and earn their certification through NNRG. We also help wood-buyers find building materials from well-managed forests, through a searchable database which we operate in partnership with the US Forest Stewardship Council. Go here for a list of our FSC-certified landowner members.

HISTORY

NNRG began in 1992 as a community-based non-profit organization striving for economic and environmental vitality on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. The organization changed its name from the Olympic Peninsula Foundation to Northwest Natural Resource Group in 1997 to reflect an expanded geographic focus. NNRG is now in its third decade of helping landowners improve the health of forests in the Northwest. You can find out more about NNRG’s history in our 30-year anniversary article.

STRATEGIC PLAN

This strategic plan lays out four targets to guide NNRG over the coming years and outlines the pathways we will follow to achieve them. Click here to read a note by our Board Chair and Executive Director about how the plan was conceived and developed.

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TARGET 1: Provide best-in-class services, resources, and thought leadership on ecological forestry for the Pacific Northwest.

STRATEGIES

1. Supply a suite of ecological forestry services to meet the changing needs of the region’s landowners.

As a recognized regional leader in ecological forest management, NNRG is well positioned to speak with authority on the advantages that ecological forestry provides. NNRG materials explain how ecological forestry can advance landowner objectives of forest resilience, climate adaptation, risk management, asset building, and financial performance. We will use a range of communication formats tailored to specific audiences, from workshops to tours of model forests, from videos to web-based courses, to show forest owners how ecological forestry can help them achieve their objectives for their land. Through GIS mapping that distinguishes properties practicing ecological forestry, NNRG will give forest owners (and wood buyers) a new way to discern the difference that ecological forestry can make.

2. Engage with partners in higher education to conduct original research on forest stewardship in the Pacific Northwest.

Some wood buyers and specifiers would prefer to use wood that is the product of ecological or climate-smart forestry, and yet building materials’ supply chains make it difficult for them to obtain it. We will foster demand for these wood products by describing their benefits to wood users and helping create tools such as climate-smart designation so those buyers can obtain them more easily and cost-effectively. We will investigate the feasibility of a supply chain specific to ecologically raised sawlogs west of the Cascades, and, if favorable, will pursue partnerships to develop one.

3. Support an organizational culture of constant improvement.

NNRG is unique in combining on-the-ground forestry expertise with an understanding of the economic and political landscape that forest owners face. We will use our knowledge to help organizations better understand available policy, carbon, tax, easement, and recreational opportunities and forest stewardship benefits through direct interaction and industry events and channels.

TARGET 2

Promote the benefits of ecological forestry to forest managers, wood buyers, and other decision-makers in the supply chain.

STRATEGIES

1. Demonstrate to forest managers the environmental benefits and economic feasibility of ecological forestry.

As a recognized regional leader in ecological forest management, NNRG is well positioned to speak with authority on the advantages that ecological forestry provides. NNRG materials explain how ecological forestry can advance landowner objectives of forest resilience, climate adaptation, risk management, asset building, and financial performance. We will use a range of communication formats tailored to specific audiences, from workshops to tours of model forests, from videos to web-based courses, to show forest owners how ecological forestry can help them achieve their objectives for their land. Through GIS mapping that distinguishes properties practicing ecological forestry, NNRG will give forest owners (and wood buyers) a new way to discern the difference that ecological forestry can make.

2. Increase the recognition ecological forestry achieves in the marketplace.

Some wood buyers and specifiers would prefer to use wood that is the product of ecological or climate-smart forestry, and yet building materials’ supply chains make it difficult for them to obtain it. We will foster demand for these wood products by describing their benefits to wood users and helping create tools such as climate-smart designation so those buyers can obtain them more easily and cost-effectively. We will investigate the feasibility of a supply chain specific to ecologically raised sawlogs west of the Cascades, and, if favorable, will pursue partnerships to develop one.

3. Provide policy guidance and stewardship expertise to individual organizations and a broader audience in the forest sector.

NNRG is unique in combining on-the-ground forestry expertise with an understanding of the economic and political landscape that forest owners face. We will use our knowledge to help organizations better understand available policy, carbon, tax, easement, and recreational opportunities and forest stewardship benefits through direct interaction and industry events and channels. 

TARGET 3

Work with people across a broader spectrum of interest groups, cultural identities, generations, and economic statuses than NNRG has reached in the past.

STRATEGIES

1. Identify fresh segments of the forest-owning public that we aim to connect with, and craft outreach strategies that deliver the message of ecological forestry to them effectively.  

So far, NNRG has grown its audience organically, directing its outreach primarily to people who already own forestland and waiting for people to find us. As a result, we have lagged in connecting with some crucial stakeholders. We will test new models of recruitment — including geographic saturation within a specific subregion and outreach tailored to larger nonindustrial landowners — and refine those approaches through experience.

2. Introduce students to the theory and practice of ecological forestry.

Young people are the next generation of forest practitioners and landowners. We will connect high school and college students with ecological forestry learning and provide pathways to related careers through connections with existing organizations and materials, through NNRG-developed curriculum and certificates, and NNRG-sponsored college internships.

3. Increase the diversity and capacity of the ecological forestry workforce.

Ecological forestry explanatory materials have thus far been provided almost exclusively in English, even though a substantial segment of the forest restoration workforce is fluent only in Spanish. Separately, the logging workforce in the Northwest is aging. NNRG will train future ecological loggers on modern equipment and develop worker-oriented Spanish-language materials on ecological forestry approaches to precommercial thinning and tree-planting.

4. Create new pathways to engage hitherto-unreached segments of the forest-enthusiast audience.

NNRG’s current website and social media posts are oriented toward readers who are forest owners and managers. We will highlight educational resources aimed at new audience segments, such as K-12 educators and aspiring forest stewards, and create streamlined digital guides on our website that each provide a curated set of resources for a specific stakeholder group.

TARGET 4

Develop a systematic approach to financial growth that supports NNRG’s programs. 

STRATEGIES

1. Continue building NNRG’s fee-for-service programs.

Since 2016, NNRG has intentionally expanded its capacity to offer harvest administration, more than doubling the area of harvest overseen annually, and introducing a new program in forest restoration. Growing these programs will enable us to reach more landowners, bring ecological forest management to a larger landscape, and launch new, as-yet unfunded NNRG projects.

2. Develop a program to enable landowners to dedicate their forests to ecological management for philanthropic ends.

Forest ownership is on the brink of a major generational turnover, and some landowners want to dedicate their land to philanthropic goals. We will pilot a mechanism by which land trusts and other charities can receive timber harvest income from land that was offered to them in donation but which they do not wish to manage. We’ll also continue to consider gifts of land to NNRG, building on the example of two generous donors who have pledged their forest tracts to NNRG after they are no longer able to care for them.

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From NNRG’s Board Chair and Executive Director:

At NNRG, we achieve our impact through the forest owners we reach. We bend the trajectory of nonindustrial forestland in Oregon and Washington toward ecological forestry not by controlling large tracts of land ourselves, but by influencing the decisions that landowners make in stewarding their own acreage. 

Our mission statement lays out the three main methods we use:

• Sharing knowledge about ecological forestry;
• Building landowners’ capacity by enhancing their stewardship skills; and
• Connecting them with markets and other financial resources that can support the cost of forest stewardship and provide a fair return for their stewardship choices.

This plan, which NNRG’s board and staff have devised for 2025-2029, aims to sharpen our use of these three tools and to broaden their application. 

Our plan begins with the premise that we must keep pace with developments in the field — for instance, by understanding the impact of climate change and comprehending the role wildfire plays on the west side of the Cascades. While NNRG has become a leading promoter and practitioner of ecological forestry, we need to stay at the vanguard of forest knowledge to provide the greatest value to the communities we serve. 

Our second premise is that we must share our knowledge so that participants in the forest supply chain can put it into action. Knowledge doesn’t help if it doesn’t reach forest owners, and the distinct value and narrative of ecological forestry is lost if wood buyers can’t readily specify its products in their purchasing decisions. We want forest owners to understand the desirability and feasibility of ecological forestry, and wood buyers to recognize the benefits of ecologically raised wood.

Third, we see tremendous potential to reach new audiences. Western Washington has more than 26,000 forest owners of 20 acres or more. We must become more strategic about connecting with fresh segments of the forest-owning population, as well as other people who care about the forests that surround them here in the Pacific Northwest. To do that, we will use new systems to identify forest owners we have yet to reach, and partner with like-minded organizations to reach new ears through their networks. 

With this plan, we will build on our past successes to improve our tools, share them more widely, and have a deeper impact on the forests of the Pacific Northwest and their contributions to stabilizing the climate, safeguarding regional water supplies, and conserving biodiversity. We hope you are as excited as we are to further this journey.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

NNRG acknowledges that our work takes place in the traditional territories of the Coast Salish and Chinook peoples, who have lived in this region since time immemorial. We are grateful to our indigenous neighbors for their millennia of enduring care for the woodlands and forests of this place.

We recognize and acknowledge the rights reserved by native peoples in the 1854-55 treaties of Medicine Creek, Point Elliott, and Point No Point, covering much of the terrain where we work. In addition, we acknowledge that unilateral action by the federal government in 1864 took the lands inhabited by the Chinook people of what is now southwestern Washington.

We are deeply honored by the tribes that have chosen to engage our partnership and assistance in the stewardship of their forestland, and are privileged to help those sovereign Indian Nations pursue their goals for their land.

We encourage all landowners to research the history and treaties that govern the land they’re situated on, and consider what that history might mean for the stewardship of their forests and the streams running through them.

Notice of Non-Discrimination

NNRG is committed to ensuring that no person is excluded or denied access to our programs, activities, services or employment, on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, language barriers or disabilities, as protected by nondiscrimination laws.

We also strive to accommodate persons with impaired vision or hearing, and to provide reasonable language assistance services to persons with limited English language proficiency to enable them to access our services.

If you would like to request accommodations or learn more, please contact us at outreach@nnrg.org.