Affiliate Organizations
About COCO's Affiliate Program
COCO acts as an umbrella organization, supporting various capacity needs, such as fiscal sponsorship or staff assistance, for the following groups.
To serve Colorado’s Arkansas River Basin communities by addressing locally identified watershed issues for economic, ecological, and social benefit.
The Arkansas River Watershed Collaborative (ARWC) is a community-generated response to wildfire and its effects on water and communities. As fires in the Arkansas River Basin and throughout Colorado become more intense and frequent, coupled with a rapidly growing population moving to fire-prone areas – the need for community and agency partnerships to address impacts and preserve the health of our watersheds is essential. ARWC is a hub for community-driven fire mitigation, forest and watershed health, and post-fire collaborative efforts.
The Collaborative covers all 23,000 square miles of the Arkansas River Basin, reaching from Leadville to the Colorado-Kansas border. Our work includes forest health and wildfire fuels mitigation, post-fire and flood recovery, stream management planning, water quality, stream restoration, collaborative development and stakeholder engagement.
To protect Clear Creek’s watershed and forest health, improving wildfire resilience through community collaboration.
The Clear Creek watershed spans four counties covering an area of 575 square miles, with 400 square miles located in the ‘upper’ watershed in the mountains west of Golden.
In 2019, a pre-wildfire risk evaluation study was commissioned by the Upper Clear Creek Watershed Association (UCCWA), the City of Golden, and the Standley Lake IGA Cities of Northglenn, Thornton, and Westminster. The study report completed in 2021 identified key needs for wildfire risk management in the basin, including:
- Specific watercourse, forest, and infrastructure vulnerabilities;
- Priority mitigation project options to manage fuels, stream channels, floodplains, wildland-urban interface, and;
- A need to establish a watershed stakeholder partnership to address these issues.
The Clear Creek Watershed & Forest Health Partnership (CCWFHP) was formed to meet the need for stakeholder coordination and collaboration and to facilitate taking action on wildfire risk. The purpose of the Partnership is to sustain ongoing wildfire planning in the basin, identify viable project sites for mitigation actions, and support forest and stream restoration projects in the watershed.
To restore, protect, and enhance Purgatoire River Watershed through stakeholder engagement, collaboration, education, and on-the-ground work for the benefit of all.
The Purgatoire Watershed Partnership (PWP) works closely and collaboratively with stakeholders across the watershed on a host of projects and educational opportunities for the benefit of our landowners, communities, and the watershed as a whole.
The Purgatoire River Basin includes 196 miles of river and covers a total area of 2,206,204 acres. It originates in the headwaters of the Culebra Range of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, and winds down through sections of the Comanche National Grasslands before it reaching its confluence with the Arkansas River downstream near the town of Las Animas.
A collective voice and representative organization for Colorado providing educational networking opportunities for communities, groups, and individual stakeholders focused on reducing the negative impact of wildfires in the state.
Fire Adapted Colorado is an independent non-profit organization closely associated with and born out of the Fire Adapted Community Learning Network (FAC Net). FAC Net is a national network of people working to build wildfire resilience capacity in wildfire-prone communities. It is supported through a partnership among The Nature Conservancy, the Watershed Research and Training Center, and the USDA Forest Service. FAC Net’s purpose is to connect and support people and communities who are striving to live more safely with wildfire. A fire-adapted community is a knowledgeable, engaged community that is taking actions that will enable them to safely accept fire as part of the surrounding landscape
Fire Adapted Colorado provides a statewide platform for information sharing and forward thinking discussion as related to wildfire issues. FACO acts as a connecting force that works with a collective voice, aimed at creating safer and more resilient communities living with the threat of wildfire.
Providing urgenly needed shelter to first responders and victimes of wildfire or other natural disasters.
EmergencyRV is a charitable organization initially established in response to the massive and deadly November 2018 Campfire, which decimated the entire town of Paradise, California, and left more than 50,000 residents traumatized and displaced.
EmergencyRV is a 100% volunteer-based charitable organization providing urgently needed shelter to first responders and victims of wildfire or other natural disasters.
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Cassidy received her M.S. in Forest Resources and her B.S. in Environmental Health Science from the University of Georgia. Her studies focused on collaborative partnership building and conserving and restoring forests for adequate supplies of clean drinking water. She grew up on the banks of the North Fork of the Gunnison River near Paonia, Colorado. She has guided multi-day river expeditions on some of America’s biggest whitewater, worked on fishing boats in Hawaii, and explored Southeast Alaska as a fly-in lodge’s adventure guide. Her wanderlust has taken her to the jungles of Borneo and the canals of Venice. These experiences have given her an invaluable perspective on human interactions with landscapes and the anthropogenic stressors our societies create.
Today, Cassidy works to deepen our understanding of and relationships with native ecosystems and improve cooperative efforts to better protect them for generations to come. She envisions a future where natural and built environments interact in a way that is protective of human health and ecosystem function. Cassidy has extensive experience bringing together diverse stakeholders to address complex natural resource concerns. Prior to joining COCO, she developed and implemented the Oconee River Watershed Partnership in Northeast Georgia and coordinated the Appalachian Trail Landscape Partnership on behalf of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy and National Park Service. Her motto is “Education through recreation.”