An audience of about 30 watches on Tuesday, March 28, 2023, as Rich Wandschneider, center, introduces Nils Christoffersen, left, and Nels Gabbert, right, from Wallowa Resources. Christoffersen and Gabbert told the audience at the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture about Working Homes, a new offshoot of Wallowa Resources.

Diane Daggett remembers those first meetings in the back of Cloud 9 Bakery & Deli in downtown Enterprise nearly 30 years ago.

Like many rural counties in Eastern Oregon, Wallowa County had been devastated by the reduction in timber harvests from federal forests: “We went from 85 million board feet in 1988 to zero in 1994,” said Daggett, a longtime community leader in the county. Mills that employed 20% of the county’s workforce shut down. Enrollment in the county’s schools plummeted.

“People were really afraid about our future,” she said.

Tensions ran high: Environmentalists were burned in effigy on Main Street in Joseph.

“It just gives you a sign of how desperate people were feeling,” Daggett said. “The community was being affected by forces that they had no control over. The environmental community was taking a stand on its values and beliefs and industry was fighting back.”

By the numbers

$2,150,635: Total OCF funding of Wallowa Resources through March 20, 2023

101: Total grants to Wallowa Resources through OCF

551: Instructional hours of natural-resource based education provided by Wallowa Resources

3,667: Acres of noxious weeds treated

424,000: Acres of forest collaboratively managed on public and private land

And yet, in the backroom at Cloud 9, Daggett and a handful of other community leaders — in particular, Ben Boswell, a Wallowa County commissioner, and Martin Goebel, head of an organization called Sustainable Northwest — were searching for even a snippet of common ground.

It wasn’t easy. But, bit by bit, they found it.

Today, nearly three decades later, the nonprofit organization that emerged from those sessions — Wallowa Resources — has racked up a long list of successful initiatives, from its first efforts in 1996 to resume small-diameter logging and to preserve salmon habitat to its latest challenge, a spinoff organization called Working Homes that’s addressing the critical shortage of affordable housing in the county.

Oregon Community Foundation has stood with Wallowa Resources almost from the first. Beginning with a $7,500 grant in 1997 to provide general assistance to the organization, all the way to a $75,000 grant in 2023 to support the efforts of Working Homes, the foundation and its donors have invested more than $2 million in the organization.

A number of those grants have been what Kathleen Cornett, a longtime foundation employee who recently retired as its vice president for grants and programs (and is a native of Wallowa County), calls “rare birds” — grants that allow an organization to build capacity.

Daggett, the first executive director of Wallowa Resources, and her successor, Nils Christoffersen, who leads the organization today, said those capacity-building grants from OCF and others were essential.

“We wouldn’t be around had it not been for OCF,” said Daggett, adding that an early grant from the U.S. Forest Service also was critical. “It’s hard to find a foundation that will invest in a startup, which requires them to invest in people. And both of these organizations were willing to do that and take a risk that we were going to perform before we had any kind of a track record.”

Christoffersen took over as executive director in 2007 after Daggett left to become the founding vice president of the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities. The transition was another critical period for Wallowa Resources, but additional capacity-building grants from Oregon Community Foundation proved essential. In particular, Christoffersen points to a grant that helped Wallowa Resources strengthen its financial management and strategic planning.

“It certainly gave us breathing room during 2007,” he said. “But, more importantly, it helped us build the foundation from which we’ve grown significantly.”

Oregon Community Foundation’s continuing support of Wallowa Resources exemplifies the foundation’s outreach to rural communities throughout Oregon. That statewide focus has been a part of the foundation’s DNA from the very start — after all, as Cornett noted, it was co-founded by William Swindells Sr., the founder of the forest products company Willamette Industries. And Swindells insisted from the start that the Foundation focus on all of Oregon, the urban and the rural.

That focus continues today, Cornett said: “I do think Oregon Community Foundation is one of the few (organizations) that continues to have a statewide perspective. It really takes that seriously.”

Added Christoffersen: “It’s dedicated to using that philanthropic capital to improve all of Oregon. … They really stay grounded and connected to all of Oregon.”

Common ground

Wallowa County wasn’t the only rural community in the West that struggled in the 1990s. It wasn’t the only community that felt, in Daggett’s words, that “it didn’t have any advocate or … any pathways forward.”

But it had Daggett, who had done collaborative work during her time as the county’s planning director. It had Martin Goebel of Sustainable Northwest, a Portland environmental group looking to launch its first project. And it had community leaders like Ben Boswell, a county commissioner.

It also had community members with different opinions and perspectives but who eventually — after plenty of discussion, including about whether the word “sustainable” was appropriate to use in these talks — rallied around a powerful idea: “Our theory was that the health of the community, economic health and the health of our lands are intrinsically linked,” Daggett said. “They’re not mutually exclusive.”

The work benefited from surprise benefactors: Once, after returning to Portland after a particularly grueling gantlet of meetings in Wallowa County, Goebel found on his desk a $10,000 check from rancher Doug McDaniel, a frequent participant in these early talks. Along with the check was a note from McDaniel that said, in essence, don’t give up on us.

Wallowa Resources and Oregon Community Foundation through the years

1996: Wallowa Resources is founded as the first partner organization of the nonprofit Sustainable Northwest. Diane Daggett is named its first executive director.

1997: Oregon Community Foundation gives Wallowa Resources a $7,500 grant to support the organization; it’s the first of more than 100 grants from OCF to Wallowa Resources.

1999: OCF gives a $15,000 grant to help buy two 24-foot stock trailers to be shared by Wallowa Resources and FFA; it’s the first grant, but not nearly the last, to support Wallowa Resources’ educational outreach efforts.

2000: OCF gives Wallowa Resources a two-year grant to support a “Community Forestry through Stewardship Contracting” project.

2007: Nils Christoffersen succeeds Daggett as executive director. OCF gives Wallowa Resources a $25,000 grant to strengthen the financial capacity of the organization.

2008: A $35,000 OCF grant helps work to design and implement a collaborative project to secure the East Moraine of Lake Wallowa. Another grant follows in 2011.

2009: An OCF grant helps support the Wallowa Mountain Institute Youth Stewardship Program, an environmental science program for students in rural Oregon.

2014: A three-year OCF grant of $100,000 each year supports a Wallowa Resources program to strengthen and increase capacity to create jobs through the sustainable use of natural resources.

2018: A $20,000 OCF grant allows for a collaboration with community leaders to develop a comprehensive water plan for Wallowa County.

2019: A three-year OCF grant helps Wallowa Resources launch a strategic planning process to help revitalize underserved communities in Eastern Oregon.

2023: Wallowa Resources spins off a new nonprofit organization, Working Homes, to help solve the shortage of workforce housing in the county.

2023: OCF gives Wallowa Resources a $75,000 grant to support Working Homes.

Nobody gave up. In 1996, Wallowa Resources was formed as Sustainable Northwest’s first partner organization.

In those early days, Daggett said, “the big focus was to get things done on the ground, put people to work and really push stewardship forward, so that it becomes embraced by people, rather than everyone just fighting.”

Early projects involved river and watershed restoration and forestry projects north of Enterprise.

Almost from its beginning, however, Wallowa Resources was expanding its horizons: A 1999 grant from the foundation, for example, helped pay for the purchase of two stock trailers to be shared by Wallowa Resources and FFA for youth programs. Since then, educational programs — including efforts to deliver science-based education to vulnerable youth populations — have become a mainstay for Wallowa Resources, and Oregon Community Foundation has helped to fund many of those.

Cornett said there are two important reasons why the foundation has continued to support Wallowa Resources, with more than 100 grants beginning in 1997. First, she said, the organization has performed well over the years. And, second: “I just think it has to do with leadership, leadership, leadership” — not just from executive directors Daggett and Christoffersen, but also from a strong board of directors.

That’s part of the reason why the foundation has been willing to fund different aspects of the work Wallowa Resources has taken on over the years. That includes early funding of the organization’s newest venture, Working Homes, which seeks to find solutions to the county’s housing shortage.

Christoffersen understands that Working Homes faces a steep learning curve as it works to acquire land, develop housing and possibly get into property management. That’s why he appreciates that Oregon Community Foundation sees the need as well, and “is open to providing funds where you need it most.”

It’s not a top-down process, he said. It’s more about the foundation listening to the communities it serves, from the metropolis of Portland all the way to the 7,500 residents of Wallowa County.

“They’re not saying, ‘No, we will only fund this or that,’” Christoffersen said. “They’re saying, ‘Tell us what you really need right now, and we’ll do our best to try to support that.’”