True Wind Collaborative served as the facilitation team for the Northwest Forest Plan Amendment Federal Advisory Committee. Originally signed into law in 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) guides the management of 24.5 million acres of National Forest Lands throughout Washington, Oregon, and northern California. Although still in effect after 30 years, the policy needed updated to accommodate changed ecological and social conditions, particularly in the face of devastating wildfires and a rapidly declining Northern Spotted Owl population. The NWFP was born out of intense social conflict between timber dependent communities, conservationists, and the U.S. Forest Service. These tensions among stakeholders and towards the agency continue to endure today.

In December 2022, the U.S. Forest Service outlined a process to amend the current NWFP and assemble a 21-member Federal Advisory Committee to represent a range of interests including conservation, timber and forest products industry, Tribal governments, rural forest communities, sciences, local governments, and outdoor recreation. This Committee was starting from a place of low trust, high tension, and prevailing social conflict. The Committee was tasked to provide recommendations to the U.S. Forest Service on updating the NWFP on key topics including Tribal involvement in forest planning, climate change, conserving old growth forests, supporting economic opportunities for rural communities, and wildfire resiliency. To make matters more complex, the Committee was directed by agency leadership that they had nine months to complete what was meant to be a multi-year process to work towards collaborative recommendations.

With True Wind Collaborative’s facilitation, the Committee successfully delivered a clear set of over 200 consensus recommendations within the accelerated timeframe. We led a series of six, three-day in-person meetings and dozens of virtual plenary and topic-specific subcommittee meetings. Our team also developed tools, reports, and frameworks along the way to organize Committee ideas on highly-complex topics to track the evolution from brainstorming through refined recommendations.

In a parallel process, our team facilitated multiple in-person and webinar engagements specifically for the 80+ Pacific Northwest Tribes to encourage transparency and early collaboration among Tribal staff, members, and leaders and agency planning staff as they worked to develop the proposed action for the NWFP amendment.