2024 Forest Service Projects
As we enter our second year of partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service National Partnership Office in 2024, we will collaborate with staff from 4 national forests to implement partnerships that accelerate the speed, scale, quality, and quantity of recreation projects to improve the visitor experience and forest resilience. These partnerships are designed to address a lack of funding or appropriate governance structures that limit land managers’ ability to deliver high-quality, sustainable recreation opportunities.
We are thrilled that for the second year in a row a commitment from REI Co-op will unlock our Forest Service challenge cost share.
Additionally, a subset of the work from Year 1 will move from an “Explore” phase to a “Design” phase as Quantified Ventures helps individual forests develop their partnerships and implement projects. Check out our blog post to learn more about the partnership and the 5 Forest Service projects we worked on in 2023.
Greater Yellowstone Partnership Endowment
Custer-Gallatin National Forest, Region 1
Overview
The Custer-Gallatin National Forest is in the early stages of coordinating across recreational partners to develop a cohesive vision for sustainable recreational development in southwest Montana. The long-term goal is to develop an endowment or aggregated fund that could be deployed to various partners to implement infrastructure-related enhancements across the forest.
Project Activities
QV will help to align the partners and local cities around a targeted set of project goals and objectives, and eventually work towards an investment strategy that can generate the revenue necessary to sustain operations and maintenance over time.
Alpine Lakes Conservation Finance Feasibility
Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, Region 6
Overview
The Alpine Lakes Collaborative is seeking blended financing across a wilderness area to support a network of tribes, stakeholder groups, and government agencies to develop and implement modernized visitor use strategies, including funding and user collection fees.
Project Activities
QV will assess financing and payor options to analyze financial needs, conduct a literature review to identify potential non-market values and beneficiaries from wilderness visitation, highlight options for revenue generation, and explore opportunities for partnerships with local governments and “friends-of” groups. QV will assess opportunities to leverage the existing Alpine Lakes Collaborative and identify ways to increase its capacity as an implementation partner to the Forest Service.
Forest Outdoor Recreation Collaborative
George Washington & Jefferson National Forests, Region 8
Overview
The Clinch Ranger District in the far southwest corner of Virginia receives little funding for recreational infrastructure, and basic services are not being met in comparison to other landholdings in the vicinity. The District hopes to be able to invest $10MM initially in the North Fork-Pine Mountain Complex to serve local needs and develop goodwill with the local recreational collaborative in order to scale up investments across a travel corridor and garner support from the Virginia Southwest Regional Recreation Authority.
Project Activities
QV will help build support for the Pine Mountain Complex with the local recreation collaborative, structure a financial mechanism that can aggregate funding streams from the various interested parties, and help identify and secure a long-term coordinating entity to build support at the sub-regional level.