Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program
in California’s Sierra-Cascade
This program funds capacity-building activities that support our forest and watershed health, wildfire resilience, and landscape-scale grant programs.
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.
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). The RFFCP activities statewide are supported by legislative appropriations to the Department of Conservation to support efforts consistent with the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan (pdf). We are responsible for allocating some of this funding to projects and entities in California’s Sierra-Cascade region.
Sierra Nevada-Cascade Regional Priority Plan
The Regional Priority Plan (RPP) is an interactive database and map that shows where collaborative groups are working across the SNC region and provides information on collaborative membership, governance, projects, and readiness for landscape-scale work. As a Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program block grantee, the SNC developed and maintains the RPP to help state agency partners and the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force identify, prioritize, and plan for wildfire- and forest-resilience needs and to clearly communicate regional priorities.