2026 Vermont Forest Innovation Summit

Nonprofits are significant forestland owners in the United States and are increasingly turning to their forests as sources of revenue. This session will look at how a range of nonprofits, operating at different scales of capacity, utilize their forests for both revenue and community engagement. How nonprofit organizations approach forest management, how they interact with the logging community, forest products sector and local mills will be explored. We will examine issues that NGOs share with the forest products industry, such as workforce development.

We will present a series of mini-case studies featuring land trusts, one type of nonprofit, across the country actively pursuing revenue streams in their forest management to capture the national scale of this trend. Next, the work of both Smokey House Center and Merck Forest & Farmland Center, which both a different types NGOs than land trusts, will be presented to demonstrate the balancing act of forest management, revenue generation and connection with their communities within Vermont. Time will be left to have a facilitated discussion of how the nonprofit sector can play a complementary role with industry in managing forests and where that role of nonprofits may differ in a constructive way as well.

This session will be moderated by Ole Amundsen.