By Steven Bullcoming Haworth
Truth in Focus | October 6, 2026
What could a few hundred new trees change in a small Eastern Montana community?
More than might immediately come to mind.
Shade around a school. A windbreak. A community orchard. Trees around public buildings. A food forest. Vegetation designed to reduce erosion or manage stormwater.
And perhaps just as importantly, a project that gives students and community members something tangible to build together.
The Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation currently has $5 million available through its Working Landscapes Urban and Community Forestry Initiative.
Eligible applicants include tribal governments, school districts, public K-12 schools, colleges, nonprofits, conservation districts and state and local governments. Individual awards generally range from $20,000 to $300,000.
The first review deadline is October 20 at 5 p.m. If money remains after that round, proposals can continue to be considered until funding is exhausted or the final April 30, 2027 deadline arrives.
For places like Lame Deer, Ashland and other rural Eastern Montana communities, this is worth paying attention to.
This isn’t simply about beautification
The word “forestry” can make a program like this sound as though it belongs primarily in larger cities with parks departments.
The actual program is broader.
DNRC specifically identifies projects such as windbreaks and shelterbelts, community orchards, food forests, shade-tree planting, stormwater projects and other multifunctional plantings. The statewide goal is to establish as many as 100,000 trees and woody shrubs through the program.
Those ideas translate surprisingly well to Eastern Montana.
Wind is not an abstract problem here. Neither is summer heat. Neither is the need for affordable food, attractive public spaces or projects that make communities feel like people are investing in their future.
A shelterbelt near a public facility could provide protection from wind. Shade trees around a school could make outdoor areas more usable. A community orchard could provide both education and, eventually, food.
Those are practical outcomes.
What if students helped build it?
Schools may offer one of the strongest opportunities.
Instead of simply hiring someone to plant trees, a community project could potentially become part of science, agriculture and environmental education.
Students could learn about soils, water, tree species, plant health and long-term maintenance. They could measure growth. They could learn why certain trees survive in this climate while others do not.
Older students could help plan projects, develop budgets, document results or even connect the work to business and entrepreneurship classes.
Chief Dull Knife College already demonstrates that agriculture and hands-on education belong together. Its Agriculture/Animal Science program includes soil science, farm and ranch management and production agriculture, while CDKC Extension has also operated hands-on gardening and traditional-food programs involving Northern Cheyenne youth and community members.
The infrastructure for that kind of thinking already exists. The opportunity is to build on it.
Community development doesn’t always require a giant project
Rural communities often spend considerable time talking about what they have lost. Businesses close. Industries change. Buildings age. Young people graduate and sometimes decide there is nothing for them at home.
Those problems are real.
But community development does not always have to begin with a multimillion-dollar building.
Sometimes it starts with making a place better to live.
A shaded schoolyard matters. A public orchard matters. A clean community space matters. A project that gives young people ownership in their town or reservation matters.
Not because planting trees will single-handedly reverse decades of economic change, but because communities are built through hundreds of smaller decisions about whether a place is worth investing in.
The opportunity — and the question
There are already people throughout this area who garden, raise food, teach agriculture, run small businesses and look for ways to improve their communities.
The question is whether organizations can turn some of those ideas into fundable projects.
That also means overcoming familiar barriers: identifying an eligible organization, building a proposal, creating a budget, deciding who will maintain the project and getting the paperwork completed before a deadline.
Those details are not exciting. They are also often the difference between an idea remaining an idea and an idea becoming something people can actually walk past five years from now.
Montana has put $5 million on the table.
The communities most likely to benefit will be the ones that know the opportunity exists — and can organize themselves well enough to use it.
For Eastern Montana and tribal communities, that may be an opportunity worth investigating.
First review deadline: October 20, 2026, at 5 p.m.