Lloyd McGee Honored by Peers
“Collaboration moves at the speed of trust.”
That’s a motto for our Eastern Washington Forest Manager Lloyd McGee. He has built that trust through years working in forest health collaboratives for the Conservancy, and years prior to that working in the private forest industry, giving him a unique perspective on how to come together to solve issues facing our forests.
Lloyd McGee was honored at the Pacific Northwest Collaborative Conference.
The deep connections he has created were recognized last month, when Lloyd was presented with the Collaborative Leadership Award at the Pacific Northwest Collaborative Conference. The conference included 32 forest collaboratives across Oregon and Washington with approximately 150 participants.
All of us here at the Conservancy in Washington agree, his keen insight and knowledge have helped move forward important conservation work which would be impossible to achieve without these collaboratives.
Lloyd got his start with forest collaboration while working as the forester for Vaagen Brothers Lumber Company. He served as president of the Northeast Washington Forest Coalition for 10 years. Since that initial exposure to forest collaboration, he was hooked.
Today Lloyd successfully maintains a network of forest collaboratives that develop pathways to forest restoration planning and implementation through empowering stakeholder partnership engagement with agency partners. As a Conservancy staff-member, Lloyd, along with partners, was integral in creating the North Central WA Forest Health Collaborative. Lloyd has served as Co-chair for the six years of the collaborative’s existence.
Research shows that collaborative and community-based conservation results in the greatest ecological and social outcomes. Lloyd embodies collaboration. When partners across central Washington were unsure about collaboratives, he was up front leading as an industry leader.
“Collaboration is about building strong relationships with diverse partners with the pinnacle objective being consensus support for planning and implementing transformative actions. Working with diverse groups can be messy and time consuming, but, with perseverance, will lead to a combination of the best science and social solutions to the most challenging natural resource issues.”
Banner photo © John Marshall
