New funding available for WOW shadowing opportunities!

January 8, 2019

Are you interested in launching a women-focused woodland owner program, but aren’t sure what one might look like and how it would work?

Thanks to support from the USDA Forest Service, State and Private Forestry, the Sustaining Family Forests Initiative has funding available to offset travel related costs for aspiring WOW leaders to attend an existing WOW event to shadow and learn from the event organizer(s).

WHAT: Funding for travel and related costs to attend an existing women-focused woodland owner event or program (flight or mileage, meal per-diem, hotel, event registration)

WHY: To provide WOW newbies with an opportunity to tap the knowledge and experience of WOW pros to:

  1. Facilitate more effective development of women-focused landowner programming
  2. Foster a supportive and collaborative network of professionals doing this work

WHO SHOULD APPLY: Anyone committed to developing new women-focused landowner programming in their region

To apply for this funding, please send your responses to the prompts below to Cassidy at Cassidy.Dellorto-Blackwell@yale.edu. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until all funding has been allocated.

  • Description of the event you’d like to attend (include where, when, and what)
  • How you expect to apply what you gain from this experience
  • Two statements of support are required. These do not need to be formal, they can be brief (2-3 sentence) statements pasted into the body of your application. Provide statements from:
    1. The organizer of the event you wish to attend indicating support for you to shadow at their event
    2. Your management indicating support for you to initiate women-focused landowner programming
  • Anticipated travel expense (ballpark number and description)

No event is too small to attend! This funding is meant to help you experience how others are approaching this work and plan for how you can adapt techniques for your own personal context. We also hope that by creating connections among professionals in the field, we can increase the collective capacity of practitioners.

(If you are an experienced WOW leader and you would like to volunteer to be shadowed, please post your event to the WOW calendar, indicate that you are open to shadowing opportunities, and include your contact information. Please share this opportunity with your networks.)

Author: 
Cassidy Dellorto-Blackwell