28 City Trees
The Municipal Forestry Institute
(MFI) is a week-long, high-level training
program for professionals in urban forest-
ry related positions who want to develop
leadership skills for their work in the field
of urban and community forestry. Ask any
MFI graduate, and they will tell you what
an empowering, career-transforming experi-
ence MFI is.
This was the tenth year of MFI! It took place
in a beautiful new location, the Oregon
Botanic Garden, just south of Portland. It
was a full house, with 60 participants from
the U.S., Canada, and Hong Kong. (Thank
you, International Society of Arboriculture,
for providing an international scholarship—
MFI 2015: Moments of Epiphany
it truly adds so much to MFI to have such a
diverse audience.) There were 20 different
U.S. states and two Canadian provinces
represented.
Thirty-eight attendees work for a city, 12 work
for state forestry agencies, and eight work
for nonprofits. The participants have varying
degrees of supervisory responsibility and
budget oversight, but most all of the attend-
ees manage or support a program having to
do with urban forestry in some way. Some
are planners, some are foresters, some are
natural resources professionals.
We asked some of the 2015 graduates to
send in a selfie with a one-line "Moment of
Epiphany" from their experience at MFI.
