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Vermont Family Forests
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Conserving The Health Of Our Local Forest Community

 

In the Forest

Vermont Family Forests maintains a little office in downtown Bristol, in the Old High School building, overlooking the town green. That’s our home base, where we work on forest conservation plans, scheme new workshops and projects, write our newsletters, and the like. But the real workplace for VFF is the forest itself. That’s where the abstract ideas we toss about here in the office have tangible application. That’s where the real work of enacting a sustainable relationship with the forest plays out.

Our work in the forest takes different forms. First, we work with individual family forest owners. We provide them as best we can with tools and strategies that will help them conserve their forest’s health and, when appropriate, to garner some modest economic returns from the forest that will enable them to continue their ecological stewardship. On our Family Forests page, you can read about many of the individual family forests and family forest owners involved with VFF.

We also strongly support the concept of community forests, which embody collective and mutually beneficial relationships in and with the forests around us. We have done much work over the years to cultivate community forestry in various forms. You can read about this on our Community Forests page.

Broadening the scope further, we are working to cultivate community-wide awareness of and relationship with our local forests. Our hometown of Bristol is closely connected with four surrounding communities—Lincoln, Starksboro, Monkton, and New Haven. This five-town area boundary defines central aspects of our community identity—our high school, for instance, draws students from this five-town area. We use this same geographic boundary to define the Five-Town Forest, which encompasses all forestlands within that boundary, and we are working with community members to further our collective understanding of the health of this forest, as well as the abilities and limitations of this forest to meet the many demands we place upon it. Read more about this work on our Five-town Forest page.

Lastly, we bring workshops and community celebrations into the forest. We host forest-based workshops in everything from chainsaw use to soil health, from Indiana Bat ecology to well-designed access roads. We host and participate in annual, seasonal forest-based celebrations, like Beltane and Winter Solstice. You can read about our upcoming workshops and celebrations on our Events page.

We look forward to seeing you in the forest!