Satterberg Foundation

After a three day retreat in Ashford, Washington, The Northwest Natural Resource Group (NNRG) is ready to implement their five year strategic plan. The retreat allowed the board members to focus on education, fundraising and developing their partnership with the Nisqually Land Trust.

One main function of the retreat was to provide the board with an educational seminar on ecosystem service markets, including water quality, carbon sequestration and biodiversity markets. These presentations were given by Mark Bowman, Alicia Robbins, and Michael Rylko (all board members with professional experience in those fields). This educational component was important because NNRG is embarking on a plan that aims to capitalize on those issues in order to fulfill our mission for small forest landowners.

NNRG has also developed a board based fundraising model. A presentation was given by Chris Robbins, Boardpresident, to introduce and build support for this program. A packet was provided including all the tools needed for each board member to participate and goals were set. This was important because it allowed the board to develop a level of comfort and assuage fears about taking on a fundraising role. By all accounts we achieved that and the board is excited to assist in creating long term stability for the organization.

The board was all able to go on a tour of land trust property at the retreat so we could touch, see, and smell the importance of our work. This served many purposes in building connections between our board and partners and hopefully we can continue to increase board participation on this level as well.

"I finally feel up to speed. . . This will help us to become more of a team as we move forward. . . . The opportunity to visit the lands of one of our clients and see our work in action was truly inspiring. . ."
– Marco Lowenstein, Vice President

"We are in the right place and the right time with a great group of people who know and appreciate each other. We really need to leverage this bond and raise money and we are very fortunate that we can go out there in teams to do this."
– Patti Southard

"Full speed ahead!"
– Ian Hanna, NCF Program Director