City Trees is a premier publication focused on urban + community forestry. In each issue, you’ll learn how to best manage the trees in your community and more!
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/128847
Teaching and Community Forestry: It's All about the Relationships by Stephanie Miller, Regional Urban Forester Ohio Department of Natural Resources' Division of Forestry It started with our annual get-togethers. Every spring and fall our six Ohio Department of Natural Resources' (ODNR) Division of Forestry Regional Urban Foresters and coordinator spent a couple of days together reviewing our program and visiting a community or two that had something interesting happening. A consistent theme kept arising: after a very successful 25 years of providing direct management assistance to Ohio's communities, our towns (large and small) were losing their local expertise to age and retirement. We needed a mechanism to get new or inexperienced Tree Commissioners, staff and elected officials up-to-speed quickly with the necessary tools to manage a community tree program. On top of that, Ohio's communities were preparing for Emerald Ash Borer, which required strategic management. We saw a need, and the Tree Commission Academy (TCA) was born. the walls. Having everyone's participation was critical in hashing through what best met the program goals and the needs of the TCA audience. Our urban foresters spent countless hours preparing the TCA program and curriculum while carrying on our everyday responsibilities. Most important, our families supported us and were extremely patient during this intense three-year period. From the start, TCA was unlike any other community forestry educational program. Online resources, books, ODNR Urban Forester Wendi Van Buren leads an activity for the workshops and other publications already covered basic Ohio Tree Commission Academy. tree care concepts. What Ohio communities needed were the basics on arboriculture, Urban Forestry, working within local government and people skills like marketing, volunteer management and municipal relations. As Alan Siewert, ODNR's Urban Forester in northeast Ohio, said, "The one thing every community in Ohio has in common is they are all different." We needed to provide communities with practical tools that they could customize at home. The plans were to offer a series of four "years" (freshman through senior) that was flexible and mobile for our Urban Foresters to take on the road, yet planned and well-organized so that every student received the same basic education. Basic computer software was all we needed to develop presentations, class outlines and class management tools; the Internet allowed for easy file sharing and review; and each of our foresters had specialties that they could bring to the curriculum and program development process. This program would have been nearly impossible just a decade earlier. Our team of urban foresters, each based in a different region of the state, met for two-day work sessions to review each class and its supporting materials. Each work session was complete with a posted set of rules and guidelines, agenda, goals, plenty of food, many laptops and a couple of projectors throwing the presentations on 34 City Trees