PORTLAND — A new three-year project to grow jobs and rural economies in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont through investment and knowledge sharing, got a $708,750 boost last week.

The Northern Tier Farm and Forest Jobs Accelerator project is a collaborative effort by the Northern Forest Center, Northern Community Investment Corp., White Mountains Community College, Sustainable Forest Futures and the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund.

The nonprofits will match the $708,750 grant from the USDA Rural Development and U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration with at least that much in private funding, Kelly Short, Northern Forest Center spokeswoman, said Friday in a news report.

“Our rural communities have great opportunities to turn raw natural resources into valuable products and to use our vast wood supply for highly efficient thermal energy,” Rob Riley, president of the Northern Forest Center, said.

“The Farm and Forest project aims to generate more income in these counties and keep more of it circulating in the rural economy,” he said.

The project is one of only 13 projects across 12 states awarded funding from the Obama administration’s $9 million investment in rural communities to foster job creation and innovation, according to a U.S. Economic Development Administration news report.

Riley said the Northern Tier Farm and Forest Jobs Accelerator project will also address the high cost of energy by expanding the Model Neighborhood Project run by the Northern Forest Center and its partners.

The center is based in Concord, N.H., but has an office in Portland.

“We’ll be able to help more homeowners, municipalities and affordable housing organizations replace their oil furnaces with efficient wood pellet boilers,” Riley said.

“The Northern Forest spends $6 billion a year on heating oil when instead we could be using our local wood resource, creating forest-based jobs and keeping that money working here in our local and regional economy,” he said.

Late Tuesday night, Riley said in Portland that funds from the grant will be invested into the wood-based economies in Oxford and Franklin counties.

“The wood-based economy is a critical place that’s important to Maine and to the broader Northern Forest region of Maine,” Riley said. “We can continue to look at investing to create jobs, you know, in the most innovative ways we can. That’s the bottom line. That’s what we’re trying to achieve.”

He said the center’s work in Western Maine mostly relates to wood energy and wood products.

“We’re not looking to create a processing center,” Riley said.

“What we’re really looking at is a region in which we can continue to develop those types of industries that have an alley to their own resource material.

“So, you know, instead of shipping the saw logs out, we can encourage secondary wood products’ manufacturers to create furniture and build wood products, whatever that may be,” he said.

He said the center will also invest in value-added production and wood energy efficiency retention. It also seeks a broader way to market products that are grown and produced in Maine in a more coherent and collected manner.

“We see that wood products manufacturing is a critical player in their regional economy that we can continue to invest in,” Riley said.

That means working directly with wood products’ companies to increase innovation and creativity by introducing new concepts or concepts that may lead to manufacturing.

The center will also help these businesses implement that with small grants, technical assistance or key knowledge of the work, he said.

“On the wood energy side, we can help nonprofit organizations and homeowners — in some combination — install high-efficiency, automated wood-pellet boilers so they can retain some of that money that’s flowing out of the region to heating oil,” Riley said.

“And it will be helping some of our wood pellet manufacturers, like up in Strong. It will increase their production by creating demand in the region.”

For example, Riley said the center is working with Bethel officials to install a wood pellet boiler in the town office.

“Hopefully, by stabilizing and enhancing some of these businesses it will lead to job creation,” he said.

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