North State

The community of Crescent Mills in Plumas County celebrated the opening of a new sawmill operated by J&C Enterprises at a formerly abandoned sawmill site. The Wood Utilization Campus opened after years of efforts by the Sierra Institute to assess and cleanup the brownfield, in cooperation with the U.S. EPA and Plumas County. The site will consist of a variety of businesses that generate value-added products out of small-diameter trees and other woody biomass.

Plumas-Sierra Telecommunications has found innovative ways to bring high-speed internet to the rural reaches of Plumas and Sierra Counties. In 2010, the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act helped to fund the construction of a fiber system backbone. More recently, $9.6 million in California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) grants will help to expand fiber to bridge the digital divide to unserved and underserved areas of California.

The ΓÇ£California Resilient Careers in ForestryΓÇ¥ proposal by the Foundation for California Community Colleges was recently awarded $21.5M through the American Rescue Plan Good Jobs Challenge. The four-year project will coordinate and expand forestry & fire-safety training programs in the Sierra Nevada and Cascade regions of northeastern California. The program will help to address currently projected shortages of thousands of workers for well paying forestry and fire safety jobs.

The Dixie Fire Collaborative worked in partnership with the Plumas County planning authorities to create a pre-approved set of house plans that will help expedite the rebuilding process for those who lost homes in the Dixie Fire in 2021. Additional innovative housing initiatives include the production and manufacture of model homes made entirely of cross-laminated timbers. Groundbreaking on these innovative model homes has occured in Greenville, a community consumed and nearly entirely destroyed by the Dixie Fire.

The Connected Communities Project is a visionary effort led in partnership with the US Forest Service, Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship, and community partners to connect 15 mountain towns for economic prosperity through outdoor recreation – an $887 billion industry. It will create a vision for a recreation-focused lifestyle through community investment, shared stewardship, economic opportunity, and important new local jobs, all benefiting economically disadvantaged communities in the North State region.

The Population Health Innovation Lab designs, catalyzes, and accelerates innovative approaches that advance health, well-being, and equity. Many Northern State Counties are disproportionately affected by high Adverse Child Experience (ACE) scores. PHIL, a program of the Public Health Institute, is combating this by forming a regional, multi-sector collaborative in the North State to address opportunities for systems change that mitigate trauma and domestic violence and support resilient, healthy communities.