Center Operating Principles

All activities of the Center will promote reciprocity between communities and non-community-based participants. Researchers and community members will interact as co-learners seeking to generate, translate, and integrate knowledge for community benefit.

The Center will honor local knowledge of history, resources, and community while providing and training rural residents to obtain new information that is understandable and may be effectively used by community members. The Center’s approach will be participatory, involving local people in as many facets and activities as possible to build and develop local knowledge, expertise, and capacity.

The Center will recognize that process is as important as product in improving the decision-making capacity of communities with regard to forest resources. The Center will support processes that result in improved decision-making related to forest resources and communities.

The Center will recognize and address forest-related issues in the context of the whole community system, not in isolation from it. The whole community system includes community history, culture, social, environmental ,political, economic, and spiritual conditions that interact to produce opportunities and constraints in the use of forests and other community assets. The Center will address the full spectrum of research and information needs related to forest resources without promoting one type of information or area of research over another.

The Center will welcome and encourage involvement by all forest resource stakeholders, including, but not limited to primary and secondary industry, loggers, residents, landowners, workers, realtors, educational institutions, government, nonprofit organizations, environmentalists, bankers, and recreationalists.