TRUCKEE, Calif. – Last week, the Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation (TTCF) awarded a $1 million grant to the Sierra Institute for Community and Environment—the biggest grant that TTCF has directed in its history. The money will go towards the Sierra Institute’s Mosaic Timber operation to help thin the area’s overcrowded forests, create a forest economy, and offer a new building material called Cross-Laminated Timber.

Stacy Caldwell, CEO of TTCF was excited about the scale and impact of the grant that they awarded to the Sierra Institute. “We’ve been building trust with them over the years, seeing what they’re doing, supporting them with different, smaller grants along the way,” said Caldwell. “We’re just really confident about the solutions they have been offering.”

Jonathan Kusel, executive director of the Sierra Institute, said, “It’s unbelievable how TTCF have stepped up the way they have. It shows that they recognize the importance of this project for not just the Institute, but the community.”

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TTCF focuses on three areas of impact: protecting community (especially from fire), rebuilding a forest economy, and market-based solutions. Since 2021, they have been running financial campaigns to raise philanthropic funds in the region for projects that focus on those areas.

The Mosaic Timber project has impacts across all three areas.

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First, the Sierra Institute received additional grants from CalFire and the USDA Forest Service that total to $3 million, in addition to the $1 million that TTCF provided. They plan to work with CalFire and USDA Forest Service to thin the overcrowded sections of forest and properties that can catch fire and spread to their neighbors.

However, this biomass that is removed needs to go somewhere. Without nearby milling factories, money needs to be spent to ship the lumber to processing facilities. Alternatively, the felled logs are simply left in the forest, continuing to pose a fire risk.

Now, Sierra Institute along with its partner Mass Timber Strategy, plans to build a small-scale timber processing facility in Taylorsville to produce Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT). The site is 28 acres and was previously the home of the Old Louisiana Pacific Mill site.

CLT comes from small to medium size trees that are usually not preferred by lumber processing facilities—and are what are typically thinned out in the region to prevent fires. It has been a solution the Sierra Institute has looked to for years, primarily because it is described as carbon-smart, seismically sound, and fire-resistant.

During the Dixie Fire, the Sierra Institute highlighted the potential for rebuilding homes with CLT. At that time, the CLT they used to build models of fire-resistant homes was shipped from outside the state. But now, CLT can be sourced locally and could contribute to creating new jobs and housing. In fact, it’s already been used to rebuild the Roundhouse Council Building for the Maidu tribe in Greenville, California.

Steve Marshall, the founder of Mass Timber Strategy, has worked with the Sierra Institute for many years. “California has more CLT buildings in it than the entire United States, but it has no mass timber processing facilities here,” he said. “It’s used all throughout the Silicon Valley, even for university buildings, so it’s kind of ironic in a way that it has, in the past, come from outside the state.”

Marshall highlighted that the facility they’re building will likely be among the first CLT factories in the state of California and is based in part on small-scale CLT operations in Europe. “We’re deliberately making a smaller CLT factory than others and calibrating for the single-family home market and smaller buildings, at a scale that’s not currently being met.”

Kusel said they are planning on operations starting in early 2026, as they’ve already completed the hiring process. The TTCF grant made it possible for the Sierra Institute to put a down payment on a key piece of equipment: a hydraulic press that is central to producing CLT.

“There’s a real enthusiasm for the product that we’ve seen in the community,” said Kusel. “We’re trying to show that you can do this work on a community scale.”

Both Kusel and Marshall hope that Mosaic Timber can serve as a model for other mass timber solutions in the future. Even the name Mosaic Timber reflects that, according to Marshall, who invented the name. He said, “It reflects the many different pieces being put together. We’re putting material into many kinds of buildings, and hopefully we can serve as a model for other businesses—making them pieces of the mosaic as well.”

The project is still raising funds, as they have a projected cost of $10 million—but the current funds they’ve received have paved the way for it to materialize.

Eli Ramos is a reporter for Tahoe Daily Tribune. They are part of the 2024–26 cohort of California Local News Fellows through UC Berkeley.