A Collective Effort – Community Wood Banks in New Mexico

Written by Juan Lemos and Rachel Bean

The Zuni Mountains Collaborative is a working partnership of over 30 agencies, organizations, state entities, tribes, universities, cooperatives, and individuals in west-central New Mexico. In 2023, members of the Collaborative identified a disconnect between the amount of wood being harvested from ecologically beneficial thinning projects in the forested Zuni Mountains and neighboring communities’ need for firewood and fuelwood sources. In response, members of the Collaborative, including the Forest Stewards Guild and the US Forest Service, partnered with the National Forest Foundation (NFF) to bring the Wood for Life program to this landscape.  

The Guild has worked with Tribal and traditional communities over the past two years to build the capacity of community wood banks – local fuelwood distribution programs that source firewood and make it available to the surrounding community – and to select four of these wood banks to serve as Wood for Life “hubs.” These hubs are strategically located to receive semi-truck loads of logs from the Zuni Mountains and redistribute them to smaller surrounding wood banks or families, thereby maximizing the number of people who can be supported by the program. NFF administers the program and coordinates deliveries, and the Forest Service provides the funding. 

The loads of logs that are delivered to wood bank hubs need to be processed before being distributed to the community. Processing firewood requires significant work and equipment – cutting 20-foot logs into 18-inch rounds, splitting those into firewood, and stacking the firewood into cords – so the Guild and partner organizations like Dine Baadeiti have adopted an “all hands on deck” approach. Volunteers are asked to show up to the wood banks for a few hours on weekends, with the idea that many hands make for light work. Local groups, like Yee Ha’olnii Doo Tseiiahi community center, the Tse’ii’ahi Chapter House, and the Senior Advisory Council on the Navajo Nation north of the city of Gallup, partner together to organize and host these volunteer workdays.  

Guild staff attended several of these community workdays at the Standing Rock wood bank hub in February and March. Volunteers, ranging in age from 7 to 70+, used chainsaws, hydraulic splitters, axes, and mauls to make a dent in the large piles of logs scattered around the yard, knowing that the firewood would be distributed almost as fast as they could cut it. At the end of each day, the volunteers gathered to share a meal. More equipment, larger storage spaces, more volunteers, and many more community workdays will be needed in the future as this program ramps up. 

Along with other capacity-building and wood-sourcing efforts, the Guild and its partner organizations are taking a “cross boundaries” approach to connect fuelwood to local distribution programs. This success is made possible through the dedicated work and partnership of Tribal and Traditional community members and natural resources managers, grassroots local organizations, the guidance of the Zuni Mountains Collaborative, and land management organizations including the Guild, NFF, and USFS.