Community Tree Leadership Forum
Resource Materials
The Community Tree Leadership Forum is a cooperative project of The Arbor Day Foundation and the Alliance for Community Trees focused on the needs of nonprofit and volunteer organizations working to protect and restore urban forests. The project is supported by a grant from the USDA Forest Service.
The Community Tree Leadership Forum seeks to increase the impact of tree groups by strengthening knowledge and practice in the key areas most critical to their success. This information can help existing nonprofits become even more successful and serve as a resource for new organizations are they are being formed.
The links below will allow you to access PDF files containing resource modules on marketing, fundraising, volunteer management, nonprofit standards of excellence, public policy, and partnership and collaboration. These modules contain great information and useful exercises and forms that you can use or adapt to your individual situation.
Downloads
Marketing is an important strategy to help community groups define their value and service in the marketplace. All nonprofits operate in a very competitive marketplace. Urban forestry groups face competition from other tree, park, and conservation causes, but there is far greater competition from other sources. The most staggering competition you face is from the nearly 1,500 advertising messages bombarding the average adult daily.
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Some of the biggest challenges facing community forestry groups are getting heard, having influence, and competing against better-funded causes or issues. Collaboration is a powerful strategy to leverage a greater number of voices, resources, and volunteers, resulting in a concentrated focus. An elected leader can easily ignore one small nonprofit politely asking for action on an issue. On the other hand, when 14 groups join together, representing thousands of volunteers and voters, they become a significant influence.
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More than ever before, there is public concern and scrutiny for how nonprofits manage the services they deliver and how they operate. There is an expectation by funding institutions, government agencies, individual donors, and volunteers that nonprofits meet the highest standards of operation. Mega-nonprofits like United Way and the Red Cross are evaluated on an ongoing basis to ensure they deserve the public's trust. But increasingly, all nonprofits are expected to be ethical and to implement best practices.
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Fundraising is often viewed as complicated, mysterious, and scary. It's assumed that you need to hire someone with appropriate credentials, as one would hire an accountant, plumber, or lawyer. Another myth is that professional fundraisers show up with a list of rich people who always say yes, which means that volunteers and board members, will not be forced into the awkward position of asking friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers for support.
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In communities large and small, public policy is the mechanism by which impacting the “public good” are debated, analyzed, researched, argued over, and ultimately decided. This process of, “…some action taken by government to resolve issues of public concern” is commonly referred to as public policy.
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Every day nonprofits have to figure out how to get people to do something, with some degree of quality, sometimes again and again— for free. That is the nature of volunteer recruitment and retention. If you are in the business of community or nonprofit work, volunteer management comes with the territory. In promoting the value of urban forests, successfully recruiting and managing volunteers can become your most effective strategy for mobilizing ordinary people to spread the word.
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