The Brown Bag Lunch Series is a monthly webcast held at the lunch hour. The goal is to provide informal training opportunities for local urban and community forestry practitioners. The trainings highlight successful programs and practices that you may want to adopt in your community.

ACT member organizations engage thousands of volunteers nationwide to transform cities for the better. Together, members of Alliance for Community Trees have planted 7.8 million trees in cities, with help from 450,000 volunteers. We're proud of our collective achievements, but there is much more work to be done to make our cities healthy, sustainable, and successful.

ACT's Annual Meeting & NeighborWoods Academy will be held November 17 in conjunction with the Partners in Community Forestry conference November 18-20, sponsored by Arbor Day Foundation and The Home Depot Foundation in cooperation with ACT and many other national partners.

National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) invites you to participate in the 9th National Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment: Biodiversity in a Rapidly Changing World, to address the challenge the changing world poses to biodiversity. The conference will provide an opportunity to look at what is happening to biodiversity in the context of radical climate disruption, human population rise, land use changes, globalization and other economic forces.

The Weather Channel's Forecast Earth invites high school students to be part of the 2nd Annual Forecast Earth Summit. To be eligible, students should submit an essay outlining what they are doing to combat climate change. Entry forms can be submitted online through October 19.

The Trust for Public Land and the National Association of Counties have issued a call for applications for a national award recognizing leadership in countywide land conservation. The County Leadership in Conservation Awards recognizes leadership, innovation, and excellence in local land conservation and park creation by county leaders across America.

Middle school students across the United States are invited to submit their solutions to environmental problems in their communities for the Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge, a national sustainability education initiative. The Siemens Foundation, Discovery Education, and the National Science Teachers Association have partnered for this initiative to educate, empower, and engage students, teachers, and communities to become "agents of change" in improving their community.

After more than a decade of grant-making, the National Urban and Community Advisory Council (NUCFAC) will overhaul their criteria for the U. S. Forest Service's Urban and Community Forestry challenge cost share grant program for 2009. The new Urban and Community Forestry challenge cost share grant program will implement new procedures that reduce the paperwork burden on potential grantees. As in the past, a 50 percent match is required from all successful applicants of nonfederal funds, in-kind services, and/or materials.