Support Ecological Restoration at Lost Valley

Lost Valley Education Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose mission is to educate youth and adults in the practical application of sustainable living skills. We achieve this by offering hands-on courses in ecological design, restoration forestry, and regenerative farming, while we steward this land for future generations. Guided by our Land Stewardship Plan, we consciously tend these 87 acres of diverse forest ecosystems for oak savannah restoration, increased wildlife habitat, biodiversity, and old growth characteristics, and we are seeking your help to fund the enhancement of these efforts. With increased risk of catastrophic wildfires in Oregon, we need to be prioritizing the health and resilience of our forests now more than ever.

In January, the Pacific Northwest was hit by an ice storm that many are referring to as “Icepocalypse”, which caused severe damage to our forest. Trees dropped limbs, snapped completely in half, and even uprooted entirely, leaving our 87 acres scattered with brush and a massive fuel load that needs to be cleaned up before fire season. This has substantially increased our workload, and the associated costs of our restoration efforts, because we now need to hire arborists to fell trees that were damaged in the storm. We originally launched this fundraiser to help us enter the next phase of our Land Stewardship Plan, and now, we are seeking your support in our post-storm cleanup to repair and restore ahead of fire season.

Before Lost Valley Education Center (LVEC) was founded in 1989, the land was managed as a monoculture Douglas Fir tree farm, and nearly all 87 acres were clear-cut. Soon after LVEC was established, the land was put into trust to protect it from industrial development, and to restore the ecological biodiversity that previously existed. Since then, LVEC has stewarded this land for oak savannah restoration and old-growth characteristics, increased habitat, soil fertility, climate resilience, wildfire mitigation, and for the overall health of our watershed.

The Lost Valley Land Stewardship Plan is a ten-year strategy that guides our restoration and wildfire mitigation efforts. Our Land Stewardship Team is already implementing many of these activities, including planting native species, thinning and pile burning, understory management, and biochar production. We are now ready to enter the next phase of the plan, and with your help, we can scale up our efforts, and address the larger, more complex stewardship projects and wildfire concerns.

Our Ecological Restoration and Wildfire Mitigation Fundraiser currently seeks to raise $10,000. This is the second launch for this fundraiser, which will run through the end of 2024, with a total goal of $100,000. Your donations will be used to:

Thank you for helping us to restore critical ecosystems and increase the resilience of our forests!