Quiet heroes.

With different stories but a shared goal of collaboration, these nine faces are making a difference in community-based efforts.

SUSAN BAREMORE

At a Forest Service planning meeting in the early 1990s, Susan Baremore listened in disbelief as officials described "insignificant" timber plan changes that would cost jobs in her northern California community. Thus began Baremore's "second career" as an advocate for multiple uses of federal forestlands. Although busy with two children, Baremore founded the Susanville chapter of California Women in Timber and began organizing local rallies in opposition to the Lassen National Forest plan. A member of the Quincy Library Group, Baremore contributed to pending federal legislation on behalf of her community. The American Pulpwood Association honored her earlier this year for demonstrating that activism begins and ends at the grass-roots level.

HENRY CAREY 

As a college student, he worked for a Hispanic rancher. As an adult, he studied forestry. His chosen career combines those two loves. Henry Carey, founder and president of the Forest Trust, has never understood why community-based forestry is well-known internationally but ignored here. Carey has dedicated the last 13 years to developing training programs in rural communities and administering broad forest-management programs on private and federally owned lands. "In the future I'd like to see forests making a real and enduring contribution to rural community life. In the past everything has passed through big corporations. I think there's a lot of hope and promise for communities to benefit directly."

SANDRA HILL

A job change within the District of Columbia's department of public works landed Sandra Hill in the city's tree division. She jumped at the chance and since then has put to work skills learned as an educator and community activist, as well as front-line know-how from co-chairing Nelson Mandela's visit to Washington. Urban foresters must know how to lobby, she says. A voice for urban concerns in a primarily rural-based movement, Hill would like to develop a forestry directory for groups new to forestry outreach. "Nonenvironmental groups need to understand the critical issues in natural resources and how they can help care for our environment."

LYNN JUNGWIRTH

With Lynn Jungwirth, two things are constants: her tenacity and her gray sweat-shirt. A long-time activist and member of a third-generation logging family, Jungwirth watched despair set in as mill after mill closed, then mobilized her Hayfork, California, neighbors and opened the Watershed Research and Training Center. "What needed to change was not only our relationships with each other, but our relationship with the forest. What we call community-based forestry is the only way I've found to do that." Jungwirth declines to take credit for the Center and its training programs for forest workers, but lists them as her proudest accomplishments toward that goal, "because talk is cheap - it takes money to buy groceries."

FRAN KORTEN

During her 14-year tenure in Indonesia and the Phillipines for the Ford Foundation, Fran Korten learned an important lesson: "If people are viewed as contributors to environmental degradation, then they will be. But if they are treated as part of the solution, they will be stewards of the land." Since 1992, Korten has put her philosophy to work as a program officer for the Ford Foundation's Community and Resource Development Unit in the United States. Managing grants for the sustainable use of natural resources, Korten helps communities develop a place at the bargaining table. In 1998 she moves to the Positive Futures Network, where as executive director she will assist in the publication of YES! A Journal of Positive Futures.

RUTH MCWILLIAMS

Ruth McWilliams grew up on a family-owned dairy farm, then translated that rural know-how into federal efforts within the Department of Agriculture. As coordinator of the Forest Service's National Rural Development program, she played a major role in determining agency strategy. In her current job as an assistant director for the Forest Service's Washington Office of Cooperative Forestry, McWilliams is responsible for programs concerned with urban and community forestry, landowner assistance, conservation education, and economic and community development. "I don't look at community development as separate from conservation efforts," she says. Her future goals: "to link rural and urban interests and to help people better understand the relationship between the two."

JUAN MENDOZA

Juan Mendoza didn't join the Willamette Valley Immigration Project to do community-based forestry. But with so many Latino forest worker clients, it quickly became his central focus. A deep respect for the Pacific Northwest and the people who work the land was ingrained from childhood, but so too was a sense that Latino workers were treated unfairly. Since joining the Immigration Project he's educated forest workers on their rights, helped them organize into unions and worker co-ops, and developed an ecosystem restoration training program. "This is job training for a new industry - sustainable forestry," Mendoza says. "We want to create a work force that will sustainably manage our national forest system in the Northwest."

JACK SHIPLEY

Collaboration. That word says it all for Jack Shipley, chair of the North Applegate Watershed Protection Association. After five years as vice president of the environmental group Headwaters, Shipley had seen enough divisiveness for a lifetime. "I was seeing conflict - not collaboration - all around [forestry] issues," says Shipley. "I decided to put my energies toward collaboration." He joined Applegate Partnership, a nonprofit that works to develop and nurture relationships among groups with disparate viewpoints. As a small woodland owner, stockman, and consultant, Shipley understands intimately the power of successful community-based forestry. "Collaborative stewardship has to be more than just talk. If it ceases to be real, I won't be involved."

LEAH WILLS

When Leah Wills used 18th and 19th century survey notes to reestablish original property lines in California, she was intrigued by what she found. Areas identified as rich in natural resources were substantially changed and degraded, housing some of the poorest people in the country. "That's when I asked myself, 'Who are the beneficiaries of this enormous transfer of natural and financial resources?' "Wills now deals with program development for California's Feather River Coordinated Resources Management, examining the relationship between forests and water and using it as an impetus to bring together rural and urban communities and local and national interests. "The connection between forests and water was the missing piece. Understanding their relationship connects rural and urban communities together."