Twelve towns across the Monongahela National Forest region have been meeting together for years. It started around 2016, in the aftermath of catastrophic flooding, with communities looking for ways to rebuild around their shared resource: over a million acres of national forest. It took until 2020 to develop a strategic plan. It took until 2023 — with Woodlands Community Lenders as fiscal agent — to bring in funding for the organization’s first-ever hire. That would be Josh Nease, who spent his first year mostly listening, asking questions, and learning just how complicated twelve towns and a wide range of stakeholders actually is.
What Josh is building now is connectivity — physical, as the partnership develops design and engineering projects linking downtown areas to forest trailheads, and regional, through a new gravel and bikepacking route network set to launch this spring. For visitors, it reframes the question from where am I going in West Virginia? to how many of these towns can I hit in one trip? For residents, it means seeing their community as part of something bigger. Live, work, and play: Josh says those three things are what make the towns sustainable, and the Mon Forest Towns Partnership is working to make all three more possible at once.
Learn more about: Mon Forest Towns Partnership / Monongahela National Forest
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