ANR Contracts & Grants Updates
Article

CAL FIRE Wildfire Resilience and Forestry Assistance Grant Opportunity Due May 31, 2020

  • By Kathleen P Nolan

Dear Colleagues,

CAL FIRE has created a new grant opportunity focused around providing funding for eligible entities to provide technical and financial assistance to forestland owners.  The purpose of the funding opportunity is to allow prospective grantees the ability to provide a program of financial and technical forestry assistance to nonindustrial forest landowners, where the grantee serves as the supervising entity, receives the grant from CAL FIRE and then provides outreach and/or technical/financial assistance to landowners so they can conduct forest restoration or management activities on their property.

Projects should seek to:

  1. Make funding available through agreements with landowners to pay for specific, non-commercial ecological forest improvement and wildfire resilience practices.
  2. Provide technical assistance to promote information sharing and education on the full range of effective forest management practices, opportunities and forest management education and management planning.

Projects may include forest restoration activities for forestland already impacted by natural disturbance such as fire, insect, and disease, and forest management practices that promote forest resilience to severe wildfire, climate change, and other disturbances. CAL FIRE expects to award at least $2,200,000 of Proposition 68 funding for Forestry Assistance in the fiscal year 2019/2020 with a minimum grant amount of $750,000.

This Request for Proposals (RFP) will have an open application period beginning April 1, 2020. All applications are due no later than May 31, 2020.  Applicants will submit their project applications to CAL FIRE, consisting of one (1) printed copy of all required documents and one (1) electronic copy of all required documents via email to stewart.mcmorrow@fire.ca.gov.To review the program's grant guidelines, please visit:
https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/resource-management/resource-protection-improvement/landowner-assistance/forest-stewardship/

For additional information, please also consider reviewing the program's webinar available here.

The Proposition 68 funds are authorized through Public Resource Code §80135(a) to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) for projects that provide ecological restoration of forests.

Thank you,

Kathleen Nolan, Director, ANR Office of Contracts & Grants (OCG)