Working in partnership has been crucial to the development and success of the Core Forest Sites project. This partnership approach has been at several different levels: local, regional, national and international.
LIFE as we know it
At an international level, partnership with LIFE Nature to restore woodlands that have European importance has provided a framework, major funding. It has also given scope to liaise and learn from other forest projects elsewhere in Europe, as in the welcome Estonian contribution to our conference.
Partnership for restoration
Nationally, we’ve benefited from the advice, involvement and financial support of agencies and research bodies. These include Forestry Commission Scotland, Scottish Natural Heritage and Scottish Native Woods. Partnership here has ensured that the Core Forest Sites work is both appropriate and relevant to wider work to plan and carry out restoration of important woodlands and create habitat networks.
A sense of perspective
Regionally the pan-Highland perspective of Highland Birchwoods, as project manager, has been a boon, bringing years of experience of working with small communities to bear in the Core Forest work. We’ve also had the benefit of partnership with South Lanarkshire Council, Scottish Water and the Central Scotland Countryside Trust. Each of these groups bring different a perspective and set of skills, in terms of planning and implementing woodland restoration.
Thinking local
The local level of our work underpins everything else. For without local ideas, enthusiasm and skill, no achievement of our aims, local and international, would be possible. Here, we’ve been able to develop and maintain a wide range of partnerships. These have been with public and private organisations, agents, landowners, communities and individuals.
Trees without frontiers
From the level of an individual wood and beyond – across regions, across Britain, across Europe – we’ve been building connections, making partnerships. And we know, through that experience, that the sum of the efforts of all these hundreds of partners really is and will be much, much more than could have been achieved by each working in isolation.
Core Forest is about linkage, not separation. And that’s why partnership has been such a vital element in our work and thinking.
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