I spent most of last week in San Francisco in rooms full of people trying to solve one very hard problem: keeping forests healthy and communities safe. Two convenings, back to back. The first was a two-day Sustainable Project Finance Workshop, hosted by Deloitte and organized by Meryl Harrell from Friends of the Forest Service and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The second was the Forest Hub, an afternoon convening organized by American Forests, where breakout groups worked through real landscape challenges across California and Washington.
Something special kept happening in both rooms: people were saying the same things from very different directions. Scientists + insurers. Tribal leaders + utility executives. Fire chiefs + venture investors. Philanthropists + forest product companies. All circling the same set of problems, arriving at the same set of answers. That convergence is worth paying attention to.
The unlock is almost never the money
This was the most consistent theme across both convenings, and it caught me off guard at first, given that both events were explicitly about finance.
At the finance workshop, Zach Knight from Blue Forest walked through what actually made the North Yuba Forest Resilience Bond work. The legal unlock with USFS was not a new statute or a policy change. It was switching one word: “repayments” to “reimbursements.”
That single language shift resolved a compliance problem that had stalled the deal.
The lesson the room drew was not that language is a cute trick. It is that every deal has a hidden unlock inside it, and finding it requires proximity, patience, and a willingness to sit with the other party long enough to understand how their system actually works.
The Blue Forest approach made that concrete. Rather than hiring economists to write reports and hoping decision-makers would read them, the team sat with water agencies and asked how their systems worked. What is the head on your hydropower reservoir? What is an acre-foot of water worth to you? The water agencies built their own economic models. The result was not just a better model. It was genuine buy-in, because they had built it themselves.
That pattern showed up everywhere. Patrick Wright described how California cut planning cycles from years to months not by adding money but by deploying decision support tools and shifting the framing from “fuel reduction project” (which triggers mitigation requirements) to “forest health project” (which gains agency support). A small language shift, a major operational difference.
At the Forest Hub, a community resilience breakout group offered a similar reframe: this is not a wildfire prevention problem, it is a home ignition problem. The goal is not to stop wildfires. It is to stop wildfires from destroying homes. That shift changes the success metrics, the program design, the partners you need, and the story you tell to attract funding. It is not semantic. It is strategic.
The actual capital constraints are real but different from what I expected going in. The money just isn’t moving fast enough. Esther Duke from Coalitions and Collaboratives named cash flow as the persistent chokepoint for community-based organizations, most of which carry one to three months of reserves and are funded almost entirely through reimbursement. The policy fix is not complicated: shift to substantial upfront payments at the federal and state level.
Community trust is the longest lead time
I facilitated the Plumas Community Resilience breakout at the Forest Hub, and the group kept returning to a fundamental challenge: dispersed, high-risk, disadvantaged communities across a highly fragmented ownership landscape. Federal land, private industrial land, private non-industrial land, state land. Second homes. Transient populations. Communities where grant funding runs out before trust is built, and then the whole process has to start over.
The group’s priority innovation idea was a ‘Pooled Community Impact Fund,’ a centralized mechanism serving multiple communities simultaneously, enabling economies of scale. Public funds provide the foundation for major infrastructure. Private partnerships fund ongoing maintenance and operations. The measure of success was specific and telling: resident-initiated action. Once communities witness results, they begin to act independently. That is the goal. Not dependency on the program, but the conditions for self-sustaining behavior change.
That logic echoed everywhere. I heard Bill Tripp describe the Karuk Tribe‘s co-investment fund, which started with t-shirt sales and community dinners, grew to $1.4 million, and now has a scaling logic that at $60 million could permanently fund 110 on-the-ground Indigenous stewardship positions nationally. Elemental Impact ran a tree seed summit that brought together 60 stakeholders and ran cone collection workshops to build community trust around post-wildfire restoration, before a single dollar of investment moved. The Tahoe Fund offered to raise money for the first 5,000 acres of Tahoe West if the Forest Service committed to treating them immediately, using philanthropic capital as a forcing function rather than a gap-filler.
Trust cannot be manufactured quickly. But it can be built deliberately, and the field is finally treating it as infrastructure rather than a soft prerequisite. These are not coincidences. They are a recognizable approach: earn trust early, often at small scale, and use it to unlock much larger action.
On building durable forest coalitions
The field is ready to move from experimentation to systems
What struck me most was not any single innovation, it was the pattern. Six priority concepts came out of the finance workshop’s working sessions, and every one of them was a system, not a project.
A standardized but locally customizable metrics menu, because the field has identified dozens and dozens of relevant metrics and keeps reinventing the wheel. A pooled fund for catalytic investments that can write a $4 million first-in check and move fast, because the Altadena Fire showed that $9 million in investment could have prevented $40 billion in loss. A resilience contract structure giving private landowners property tax reductions and potential insurance benefits in exchange for treatment access. A revolving loan fund at multiple scales, from $200,000 for small community organizations bridging reimbursable grants up to $20 million or more for large watershed projects. A co-benefits pairing framework so that biomass, biochar, water, carbon, and biodiversity benefits can be combined into deals that pencil out even when no single benefit stream is sufficient.
At the Forest Hub, the same pattern. A California landscape resilience breakout group called for an institutional capital risk buy-down framework that could attract long-term investors to a portfolio delivering less destructive fire, fewer structures burned, improved carbon dynamics, improved water security, and biodiversity protection. The Washington group discussed an AI-augmented workforce model using technology to enable equipment operators without forestry backgrounds to implement treatments correctly. The common thread was not any one technology or financial instrument. It was replicability. Every group was designing for the next landscape, not just this one.
The question is no longer whether this work is possible. It is how to replicate it faster, across more landscapes, with less time lost reinventing what adjacent communities and regions have already figured out.
What Forests Plus is here to do
Forests Plus is designed to create the conditions for this kind of thinking, and then make sure it doesn’t stay in the room. More convenings. More landscapes. More solutions moving from whiteboard to implementation.
The finance workshop and the Forest Hub were not just events. They were proof of concept for what happens when the right people are in the right room with the right structure for thinking together. The ideas that came out of both convenings are real, specific, and actionable. Some of them will move forward. Some need more iteration. All of them deserve to travel beyond the rooms where they were born.
To every participant who brought their full expertise and creativity: you gave one of the hardest problems in America exactly the brain power it deserves. The next step is making sure it doesn’t stop there.
