Sisterhood Found: America’s Appalachia & the Mayan Heartland

By Nancy Stranahan, Director, Arc of Appalachia

Brent Charette, Arc Director of Land Stewardship (front left) inspects the impressive tree propagation efforts of CCFC.

Here is a short story of how two far-flung land preservation and education nonprofits – one in southern Ohio and one in Guatemala – found each other across the miles.

We began the Arc of Appalachia back in 1995 as a wildlands preservation organization with zero acres to our name and no money in the bank. With a combination of considerable passion, hard work, and many miracles, thirty years later the Arc has saved and currently protects close to 15,000 acres of nature preserves – mostly in southern OH, but also in eastern KY, and WV. We also host dozens of nature literacy courses each year and maintain 90 miles of hiking trails.

Ten years ago, the leadership of the Arc of Appalachia was inspired to seek out a kindred organization in Central America at the far end of many of our breeding birds’ migration paths. We wanted to find a nonprofit that mirrored many of our own qualities – scrappy, dedicated, heart-centered, community-focused, prudent and effective. But our greatest focus was on the neotropical migrating birds that we shared. By our reasoning, no matter how many acres of forests we preserved in the heartland of Appalachia, if we wanted our neo-tropical breeding birds to continue returning to our Appalachian forests each spring, then we needed to support land preservation on BOTH ends of the arc of migration. For seven years we looked for the perfect complementary organization somewhere in Central America, but none that we found ticked off everything we were looking for.

And then, Arc friends, Bob and Jean Warneke (Jean is now a CCFC Board Member), told us about CCFC. Their firsthand accounts were so stellar that we were inspired us to pack our bags for Guatemala and see their work with our own eyes. In January of 2024, I and several other representatives from the Arc, spent two blissful weeks in the highlands of Guatemala, enjoying the peerless hospitality that Rob and Terra Cahill provide to all their guests, and immersed in a casual curriculum of Guatemalan conservation and cultural education. Have I mentioned yet the marvelous FOOD???

Several of the Arc’s staff representatives are avid bakers, including Andrea Jaeger, Associate Director, who is eagerly looking on (rear central). A few minutes later, both Andrea and I had our hands in the dough.

We came home smitten by CCFC’s incredible passion, the similarities between our two organizations, and the beauty of the Mayan forests and the Mayan people. We were deeply touched by the poignancy of the rate of deforestation CCFC is working to mitigate. And, of course, we were dazzled to see so many of our beloved summer-breeding birds in their home habitat.

We even found large numbers of our beloved wood thrush, hopping along the grounds of CCFC. Guatemala is graced with these magical birds more months of the year that we are in our Arc preserves, but when the wood thrush DO visit us, they come singing.

The Arc and CCFC, working together on our respective land preservation projects, can contribute to keeping “arc of flight” between our two regions intact and connected, not only for the wood thrush, but for the other 37 species of birds we share in common. Truly, this is a match made in heaven!