I was selected to join TWP’s board in early 2026 and was super excited to visit Trees Water and People’s New Mexico office in Santa Fe for the Board meeting on August 5. My relationship with TWP began in the early 2000’s when I started my faculty position in the Forestry program at Colorado State University (CSU). Stuart Conway and Richard Fox were regular and gracious guest speakers for a senior-level forest sustainability course I taught.

It makes so much sense to me that our staff retreat was in the depths of fall this year. 

There’s no greater season for the lessons of grief, the necessity of hope, or the sureness of change.

Long before I started my first degree at Colorado State University (CSU), I knew I wanted to study sustainability. There’s no better way to spend a career, I thought, than giving back to the planet that raised me. More than five years later, that conviction hasn’t wavered.

Today is the third annual Donor Advised Fund (DAF) Day, but what exactly is a DAF? Why is every nonprofit talking about them? And… should you get one?

Many of the community leaders and our partners we work with in El Salvador, Honduras, or Guatemala have had to deal with a civil war in their country. Often forced to migrate to another country, abandoning their homes, families, and livelihoods. But regardless of the odds and incredible bravery, people come back to their communities and decide to make a positive change.

In late August, members of our Indigenous Lands team, alongside local Tribes, had the opportunity to participate in a traditional bison harvest at the Zapata Ranch Preserve.

On September 18th, we were thrilled to be joined by nearly 30 foundation and donor representatives to discuss the state of funding in Mesoamerica. 

This conversation was part of our broader effort, supported by the Ford Foundation, to analyze and support alternative economic initiatives in the region.

In the Spring of 2022, the Cerro Pelado fire burned more than 45,000 acres in the Southern Jemez Mountains of New Mexico. 

This was just one of the many widespread wildfires that have damaged ancestral lands and watersheds, vital not only to local Pueblos but to countless other communities downstream.

Our community partners face challenges, and are therefore building solutions, that are much more complex than tidy annual metrics.

But we know there is no one more invested in those solutions than they are.

One of those communities is el Asintal, an Indigenous community of 110 families who returned home with scarce resources after the Guatemalan civil war. They’ve since worked tirelessly to build livelihoods while also protecting the vulnerable forest landscapes they steward.