Central Colorado Forest Collaborative
About CCFC
The Central Colorado Forest Collaborative’s (CCFC) purpose is to foster collaboration that enhances wildfire resilience, leveraging resources and expertise to reduce risk for communities and natural landscapes. To achieve this, the CCFC’s mission is to create resilient landscapes, watersheds, and communities through collaborative, cross-boundary fuels and forest health projects.
and it is vital for renewing forests and plant life and supporting diverse wildlife habitats and healthy watersheds. However, increasingly large and severe fires threaten these natural and community resources. Achieving CCFC’s mission of increased landscape, watershed, and community resilience requires integrating diverse approaches such as mechanical and manual treatments and prescribed fire. It also requires working closely with residents, agencies, and diverse partners to co-create priorities and develop cross-jurisdictional pre-fire plans that support ecosystem health as well as community resilience.
Expanding strategic landscape-scale wildfire mitigation demands collaboration among diverse individuals, organizations, and agencies, ensuring the right work is done in the right places at the right scale.
This call to action was delivered by the U.S. Forest Service through their 2022 Wildfire Crisis Strategy, (WCS) a 10-year strategy to address the wildfire crisis in the places where it poses the most immediate threats to communities, like the Colorado Front Range WCS Priority Landscape. Together the CCFC and the Northern Colorado Fireshed Collaborative represent landscape-scale collaboration across the full extent of the Colorado Front Range Priority Landscape.
Working to bridge the gap between federal and private land management, the CCFC strives to increase cross-boundary collaboration across the Pike National Forest and Jefferson, Douglas, El Paso, Teller, and Park counties. This geography encompasses multiple land types, jurisdictions, and land managers who work on private, municipal, county, and federal public lands, including the three ranger districts of the Pike National Forest: South Park, South Platte, and Pikes Peak.
Your CCFC Contacts
Esther received her M.Sc. in Human Dimensions of Natural Resources from Colorado State University and her B.A. from Illinois Wesleyan University. She is passionate about building capacity for collaborative and performance-based conservation. Before joining the COCO. team, Esther was Senior Program Officer at LightHawk, a conservation flying nonprofit, where she oversaw staff, projects, and partnerships throughout North America. Prior to that, she was Director of Special Projects and Programs for the Human Dimensions of Natural Resources Department at Colorado State University. Esther has experience directing conservation social science trainings and conferences throughout the United States as well as in Kenya and Italy and managing research networks in China, Central America, and Europe. Esther also has experience in environmental market design research. When Esther is not working to protect and restore incredible natural ecosystems, she is enjoying them with her family. She is also an adventurous traveler, baker, and reader.
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.”