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INTERGOVERNMENTAL AGREEMENT <br />PLAY Boulder Foundation and the City of Louisville <br />Concerning the Community Forestry Corps Urban Forestry Pilot Program <br />Contents: <br />• Background, Purpose and Scope <br />• Budget, Urban Forestry Funding and Payments <br />• Deliverables and Timeline <br />Project Background: The PLAY Boulder Foundation has been hired by the Boulder County <br />Office of Sustainability, Climate Action and Resilience to manage an urban forestry program <br />intended to establish faster, more comprehensive urban forestry benefits while providing <br />meaningful youth employment opportunities that enhance both individual and community growth <br />and resilience. The program, the Community Forestry Corps, empowers underserved youth to <br />maintain and expand urban forests, gather and review critical urban heat data, and become <br />local climate ambassadors supporting community resilience and sustainable community <br />development. <br />Project Purpose: Urban areas are heat amplifiers due to a variety of factors such as <br />infrastructure and energy use. This heat amplification increases landscape desertification, but <br />also poses a huge health risk to city dwellers.However, studies show that increasing green <br />space in cities can lead to significant cooling and therefore a reduction in extreme heat's harmful <br />effects on the land and humans. For this reason, urban forestry, heat data and human health are <br />inextricably linked. <br />While the recent Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has committed to supporting many new urban <br />forestry initiatives, the current approach to urban forestry is still missing critical elements <br />required to achieve success. For example, "tree equity" is the widely promoted concept that <br />planting more trees in historically disinvested and under -canopied communities will deliver more <br />equitable futures. Although it is clearly essential that we support these communities in gradually <br />re -growing sheltering canopy, trees planted now will take 20 to 30 years at a minimum before <br />they begin delivering substantive levels of critical ecosystem services like shading and cooling, <br />water infiltration, or air and sound pollution abatement. In the interim, these same trees <br />represent a liability to the community, one it will have to find ways to maintain and protect for <br />what is essentially a generation (25 or more years) before the trees start producing substantive <br />benefits. <br />For these reasons, the Community Forestry Corps was designed with the recognition of the <br />need to commit to long-term, multi -decade comprehensive support for both the tree and the <br />human stewards needed to provide this essential care, while integrating essential urban heat <br />data and climate change education in ways that will maximize the present and future benefit of <br />tree related actions and empower future climate ambassadors. The Community Forestry Corps <br />