In late November, two staff from the VT UCF team traveled to Chicago, IL for the 2024 Partners in Community Forestry Conference and associated events, hosted by the Arbor Day Foundation.  With well over 900 participants, the conference brought together urban forestry practitioners, researchers, and partners from federal, state, and municipal government, non-profit organizations, academic institutions, and the private sector.  We asked our two team members to share reflections and resources from their week in Chicago. 

From Joanne Garton, VT UCF Technical Assistance Coordinator 

The Urban & Community Forestry Society day-long conference focused on municipal tree planting, growing and maintenance programs. Many municipalities are using accessible technology to both improve tree inventory and survivorship and connect people to trees. From installing soil moisture sensors that ping your cell phone when too dry to creating ways for locals to email or text a tree to share their stories, USFS participants and guest speaker Dr. Nadina Galle inspired me to think about innovative and affordable ways for Vermont’s urban and community tree stewards to “up their game”.

The two-day Partners in Urban & Community Forestry conference described many urban tree planting and management projects with budgets in the millions, dwarfing what many Vermont municipalities spend or could manage. However, many municipalities in other states manage these large funds by partnering with non-profit organizations, schools, or organized social groups to create and staff projects that spend-down available funds. Additionally, I learned of many national affinity groups centered on race, heritage, gender, and cultural identities that could be impactful partners within Vermont to reach new audiences and identify true community needs as related to tree equity. Examples include Latinos Progressando and GreenLatinos. Additionally, the Student Conservation Association started an Urban Forestry Program that may be an important partner to get more boots-on-the-ground work done in some of Vermont’s urban centers.

From Elise Schadler, VT UCF Program Manager 

This was the 18th annual Partners in Community Forestry Conference and I'm pretty sure that I've only missed three.  The event is always inspiring and informative, if not a little exhausting! This year I spent a lot of time thinking about how far urban and community forestry has come in the past two decades, and more acutely in the past two years since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the infusion of more than $1.5 billion into the field.  The conference was bigger, more energizing, and more diverse than ever.  

I spent the first day in a meeting with the other Urban & Community Forestry Program coordinators from across the country and the U.S. territories, as well as our USDA Forest Service partners. Between that and the conference itself, the resources that I'd like to highlight and share with our VT audiences are:

• TreeCanopy.US the first ever nationwide urban tree canopy mapping tool developed by the Arbor Day Foundation, the USDA Forest Service, and PlanIT Geo
• The Canopy Report: How America Sees Trees, a study based on a nationwide survey by the Arbor Day Foundation
• Green Schoolyards America's webpage with resources and a community of practice for developing schoolyard forests
• The Chicago Region Trees Initiative's resources on how to build laws, regulations, and policies to protect trees
• American Forests' new Tree Equity Handbook: A Practical Guide to Closing the Canopy Gap Between Neighborhoods