January 2026

Hello Heartwood friends and family,

The new year brings new opportunity and new growth, and Heartwood is proud to welcome you to our first issue of the Heartwood Pulse. This newsletter will bring you monthly updates about what Heartwood is doing, and what is going on around the region.

This tool will serve to better coordinate our cooperative efforts by helping to spread our forest-related news, as well as providing tools for action alerts and letter writing campaigns.

Heartwood will of course continue to publish Heartbeat, and to communicate through our current social media channels on Facebook and the “issues list” google-group where we share all sorts of details related to the broad range of work and active campaigns across the Heartwood region. Our new Heartwood Pulse provides a place where we can effectively put that information into action.

We invite you to be part of this new mechanism for strengthening the Heartwood network, by sending us your stories of protecting the place you love to our media team at info@heartwood.org.

We hope this new tool helps increase your effectiveness as an activist in your own community, and helps engage our own membership in Heartwood’s many active campaigns. This could not have happened without the volunteer time and effort of the wonderful people on our media committee, led by Jillian Bar-av, who has also developed the new Heartwood Forest Protection Podcast. Read on to see what she’s got in store for the first new podcast episode of the new year!

Thank you all for being part of the Heartwood network. Heartwood has been a source of inspiration and solidarity for hundreds of grassroots organizations, thousands of activists, and we hope this new communications tool helps strengthen and enhance this for us all.

For the forests,

Matt Peters

Heartwood Forest Protection Podcast