As ELF's Forest Campaigner I'm seeking your help to raise funds for our 2026 budget to support on another year of forest protection work on the Sunshine Coast. In 2025 we continued to see reasonable success in the tough job of securing forests from industrial logging.

As a provincial non-profit we're obliged to spend the majority of the previous year's budget on the organization's mandate, which means at the beginning of each year our coffers get low.

ELF's approach to forest protection is to be pro-active in solving the problem at hand. We obtain 5-year logging plans from BCTS and SCCF, find the proposed blocks in the field, then get into place trails into these forests so researchers, First Nation elders and the public can access more easily. Then we hire out the research and put together reports to present a case for forest protection.

In 2026 the expansion of the Mt. Elphinstone Prov. Park from 140 ha to 1,500-2,000 ha will again be a focus which would result in a protected area 6X teh size of Stanley Park. And, we have up 8 forests identified by our GIS mapper to be areas that must be saved from logging.

And, this year we plan to hire a local artist (Tyler Gentry) to design eco-gardens along our trails. This project will be our first allocation of monies raised from you and we're really excited because the first few installations he completed were awesome. Two of them are found along the Health Trail and another two on the Oxygen Trail. They are really works of art due to the care that Tyler puts into them. As a young artist, we want to pay him a decent hourly rate so please donate generously so that we can get to work.

We will share the locations of these new eco-gardens at our website and Facebook page so you can visit them on your next hike. One of the objectives of this project is to inspire people to use the many trails that ELF has made over the years and to stop and admire.

Here's a sitting area recently completed along the Health Trail. Imagine more of these beautiful places to be discovered in across the local Elphinstone Forests. Thank you for supporting ELF in 2026.

Best Regards,

Ross Muirhead

ELF: Forest Campaigner