Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program
in California’s Sierra-Cascade

This program funds capacity-building activities that support our Wildfire Recovery and Forest Resilience Grant Program.

The activities we fund foster organizational growth and project pipeline development and make technical assistance available to all tribes, organizations, and collaboratives working on forest and wildfire resilience in California’s Sierra-Cascade region. Additionally, we are piloting an effort to promote lower-capacity tribal partner participation in regional resilience work.

The goal of this program is to support the creation of forestry collaboratives that serve California’s entire Sierra-Cascade region, which can work at the landscape scale.

three people standing next to a map on an easel under a pop up tentThree workers with chainsaws rest on side of a mountain. A forested mountain canyon is in the backgroundlooking at the backs of three people wearing hard hats as they look up at several tall trees

Example Projects

  • Capacity support and development to support organizational growth. This may take the form of training, workshops, technical assistance, funding additional staff, or support for developing formal agreements or MOUs between collaborative members.
  • Project pipeline development funding to move projects to their next stage. This may take the form of funding for project concept development and design, permitting, creating funding strategies and grant writing.
  • Tribal capacity building in the form of a pilot program which will dedicate funding, technical assistance, and one-on-one support designed to help lower capacity tribal partners compete for grants on a level playing field.
  • Region-wide technical assistance services in areas such as project implementation contracts and agreements, grant writing, and board development.

Process

Contact your county’s Area Representative to discuss ideas and eligibility. Eligible grantees will be asked to complete a rigorous self-assessment and interview with our staff prior to being invited to submit a proposal.

Funding Source

We are using funding from the Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program (RFFCP). RFFCP activities statewide are supported by a $110 million legislative appropriation to the Department of Conservation from California’s 2022 General Fund to support efforts consistent with the California’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan (pdf). We are responsible for allocating $11 million dollars of this funding to projects and entities in California’s Sierra-Cascade region.