Staff Spotlight: Oliver Ogden
Oliver Ogden came to Sustainable Northwest by way of the timber industry. After graduating from the University of Montana with a degree in forestry, he spent five years working for a forest products company in Montana, where he managed procurement operations and developed relationships with small woodland owners across the Northern Rockies. That experience gave him a deep understanding of the supply chain challenges that make it difficult to bring sustainably sourced wood to market at scale.
As a Wood Markets Program Manager at Sustainable Northwest, Oliver works to build and strengthen the connections between landowners who manage their forests for ecological health and the architects, builders, and manufacturers who want to use responsibly sourced wood. His work spans everything from negotiating timber purchase agreements to coordinating chain-of-custody documentation that allows projects to verify the origin and management practices behind every board.
Oliver has been a key contributor to Sustainable Northwest’s work on the Portland Airport terminal rebuild, one of the most high-profile mass timber projects in the country. He helped identify and vet the family-owned and Tribal forest operations that supplied the wood for the project, ensuring that every log met the program’s sustainability standards while also being commercially viable for the mills processing it.
“The wood products industry is at an inflection point,” Oliver says. “Consumers and developers are asking where their wood comes from and how it was managed. That is an enormous opportunity for the kind of landowners we work with, people who are already doing the right thing on their land. Our job is to connect them with markets that recognize and reward that stewardship.”