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