Resource Management Service, LLC: A Three-Time 2020 Recipient
Resource Management Service (RMS) is proud to have been recognized earlier this year by three of our most valued partners for our work on longleaf pine restoration, for being a top employer within the forest management sector, and for providing important advocacy leadership and support to the private forest landowner community.
This past spring and summer, the Society of American Foresters (SAF) honored us with its “Employer Leadership Award.” The Forest Landowners Association (FLA) honored us with its “Corporate Partners of the Year Award”, and the Longleaf Alliance (LA) honored us with its “Palustris Corporate Achievement Award”.
Commenting on the honors, our president and CEO, Craig Blair, said, “As a company, we tend to keep a low profile. We prefer to allow our actions as practitioners of responsible and sustainable forestry and as a partner to other organizations that share our passion for it, to speak for us. However, it is very gratifying to be recognized by these three organizations because we have great respect for their people, their missions, and their values. Being honored by them in these ways, and all in the same year, means a great deal to our company, to our people, and to our investors.”
RMS is one of the world’s leading providers of forest investment and management services for institutional and high-net-worth investors. Such investors own forests to preserve capital, enhance portfolio diversification, hedge inflation, promote environmental sustainability, and to generate returns that are comprised of both near-term income and long-term asset appreciation.
Established in 1950, RMS’s culture was shaped by our founders, John Bradley and Harry Murphy, young graduates of the schools of forestry at Yale University and Penn State University, respectively. They recognized that forest landowners could benefit from the skills and expertise of highly trained foresters who understood the business of growing and selling timber and who were committed to practicing exceptional forest stewardship. Their example continues to influence our business today. In fact, we believe our recognition this year by the Society of American Foresters, the Forest Landowners Association, and The Longleaf Alliance was a result of not only our actions as a company but because of the core values John and Harry instilled in our firm, which emphasize integrity, accountability, and innovation.
About the Society of American Foresters Employer Leadership Award
The mission of the Society of American Foresters is to advance sustainable management of forest resources through science, education, and technology; to enhance the competency of its members; to establish professional excellence; and to use its knowledge, skills, and conservation ethic to ensure the continued health, integrity, and use of forests to benefit society in perpetuity.
The organization’s “Employer Leadership Award” recognizes an employer of SAF members that demonstrates leadership by consistently and significantly supporting its employees’ participation in SAF and their broader engagement in the profession.
In advancing consideration of RMS as a potential recipient of the award, Professor Fred Cubbage of North Carolina State University’s College of Natural Resources, Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, and a past SAF president wrote, “RMS is indeed the epitome of this charge (the SAF’s mission), and has made broad and deep contributions to SAF throughout North Carolina and the South.”
Professor Cubbage went on to praise the specific efforts of RMS employees Tony Doster, Travis Hughes, Robby Evans, Mitchell Brendle, and Cierra Ward for their support and work on behalf of SAF.
In accepting the award for RMS, Craig Blair said, “To be recognized by your peers is an honor of the highest magnitude. RMS’ belief that we must give back to our profession is reflected in our vision statement: ‘To advance the practice of forestry and appreciation for the societal importance of privately-owned forests.’ We believe this award reflects our efforts to recruit the best and brightest people from all sectors of society to the forestry profession by mentoring young foresters and resource professionals – many who have diverse backgrounds and cultural origins – through our scholarship and internship programs.”
This award also reflects our desire to give back to the profession of forestry. We encourage our employees to be members of SAF, and to be active leaders in local, state, and national SAF chapters and work groups. We seek opportunities to be mentors to the next generation of foresters and resource managers and to “educate through example.”
About the Forest Landowners Corporate Partner of the Year Award
The Forest Landowners Association (FLA) represents the stewards of America’s private forests: private landowners who manage their lands with a sustainable approach, ensuring the prosperity of their forests for future generations. The organization’s members range from large family forest owners, whose lands have been in their families for generations, to those who have become forest landowners because they view forests as a long-term investment. FLA was founded to advocate policy initiatives that address its members’ economic challenges, to ensure their property rights, and to promote the vitality of forest landownership. The organization is committed to preserving America’s tradition of private forest ownership, promoting the importance of forest resources, and ensuring a legacy that can be passed on to the next generation.
FLA’s “Corporate Partner of the Year Award” recognizes one organization each year that has been instrumental in helping it achieve its objectives.
In describing why RMS was chosen as this year’s recipient, FLA President Scott Jones said, “RMS is one of the world’s largest and most experienced providers of comprehensive timberland investment and forestry management services. RMS’s primary responsibility is generating superior, risk-adjusted, long-term investment performance for its investors. One way they do this is by practicing sustainable forestry and environmental stewardship on client-owned timberlands. As an independently owned and operated company, RMS has established a legacy by optimizing the biological, financial, and societal values for the forest assets they manage. This approach is not only consistent with RMS’s forestry heritage and values; it also aligns with the interests of their investors and our mission here at FLA.”
The FLA Corporate Leadership Award recognizes RMS for leadership in advocacy that aligns with the mission of FLA, which emphasizes developing and sustaining deep and diverse markets for forest products, promoting working forests as having a role as a natural climate solution, and leading innovative and successful collaborative approaches to conservation of at-risk and listed species, notably the National Alliance of Forest Owners’ “Wildlife Conservation Initiative,” and “Conservation without Conflict.”
About the Longleaf Alliance’s Palustris Award
The Longleaf Alliance is focused on ensuring a sustainable future for the longleaf pine ecosystem through partnerships, landowner assistance, and science-based education and outreach.
RMS was chosen to receive its annual Palustris Award for our long-standing commitment to the Alliance’s objectives. We were instrumental in developing the strategy for “America’s Longleaf Restoration Initiative,”whichenvisions restoring eight million acres of longleaf pine ecosystems across the species’ historic range in the U.S. Southeast by 2025. While significant strides have been made toward this goal in recent years on both public lands and smaller private ownerships, in order to fully realize the eight million-acre goal, RMS has been working to involve larger owners of working forests in the initiative.
In 2015, we created the concept of the “Coastal Headwaters Longleaf Forest” initiative, which is an effort to establish the first landscape model for restoring and conserving longleaf pine habitat on lands owned by large owners of working forests, including institutional investors like those we serve. Working with The Conservation Fund and more than 30 other public and private partners (including The Longleaf Alliance), our goal is to restore and conserve up to 200,000 acres in lower Alabama and the Florida panhandle through perpetual conservation easements and other mechanisms that will help re-establish and protect in perpetuity working longleaf forests and functional longleaf ecosystems. We see this effort not only helping to restore the iconic longleaf pine’s status as an important component of the South’s coastal plain forests but also providing rural economies and communities with economic opportunities and helping to conserve habitat for at-risk and endangered wildlife species, like the gopher tortoise, reticulated flatwoods salamander, Florida pine snake, Carolina gopher frog, and indigo snake.
More About RMS
RMS is led by investment-trained professional foresters. Our founders believed in the importance of employee ownership, and that principle is still fundamental to how our business operates today. Our culture is anchored by a dynamic and entrepreneurial spirit. We believe these characteristics promote commitment and enable us to recruit and retain a talented and increasingly diverse, global workforce, which currently numbers 165 people.
All of the working forests we manage for our investors in the U.S. and abroad are third-party certified to the world’s leading forest management standards, including the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI®) and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC®). We also are signatories to the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI®). These affiliations, combined with our forestry heritage, strongly influence our approach to forest sustainability as well as our commitment to raising societal awareness about both the importance of forests and the rewards of pursuing a career in forestry.
