Stacy Kontrabecki: 2 Decades of “Going Green”

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Stacy Kontrabecki, Principal at Swampdancer Resources, has been working in the forest products industry for nearly 20 years.  Stacy cut her teeth working as a forester in Southern loblolly pine plantation harvests and timber procurement for Fortune 500 lumber, plywood & paper mills back in the 1990’s.  Her first week on the job was grading logs in the mill yard for plywood production!

After a brief foray managing grants for the USDA Forest Service urban forestry research programs out West, she took a temporary post with the Maine Forest Service to administer the $25 million federal forest and community recovery grant awarded to the state after the 1998 Ice Storm. With years of experience servicing the Massachusetts Forestry Bureau as a contractor in their various forest management projects, and about the time the MA public forestlands became FSC certified, she moved into Forest Stewardship Council forest management auditing for a major US certification body. Moving up the supply chain to work with mills and manufacturers and the FSC Chain-of-Custody standards was a natural move.

Stacy’s business development & marketing savvy is a product of this diverse forest products experience and her extensive moonlighting and volunteerism over the years.  See her work history for more detail. 

A creative at heart (Stacy designed and manages this website), Stacy is always in pursuit of the most concise and effective way to communicate standard requirements while leveraging the unique practices which make each of her clients a leader in their industry niche. Stacy’s strengths lie in interpreting and teaching complex systems procedures and operating standards, both technical and scientific, in lay-mans terms.

Stacy’s specialties and passions in Forest Stewardship Council certification include smallholder (FSC forest management and supply chain/manufacturing groups and associations) and multi-site supply chain/manufacturing organizations.

Stacy’s current pleasure is working with FSC certified companies and those aspiring to be FSC certified; codifying procedures and ensuring continuing conformance to the ever-evolving FSC standards. Stacy continues to conduct FSC CoC audits on behalf of FSC certification bodies, so she is comfortable in both roles – the auditor and the audited.

Stacy Kontrabecki received her forestry degree from Virginia Tech in 1994 and her masters in business administration from Boston University, while working full-time, in 1997.

Stacy is a certified FSC Lead Auditor and ISO 9001 Auditor and maintains a forestry license in Massachusetts. She is a contributing member of the Forest Stewardship Council and the Forest Guild and is an SDO Certified Women Business Enterprise (WBE) & Certified Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) vendor.

Stacy lives in the lovely village of Shelburne Falls in Western Massachusetts and, as a volunteer, coordinates the Hilltown Legacy Tree Project there.

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