Joe Smith is a Deputy Director with the Forest Service’s National Partnership Office. During his tenure with the NPO, Joe has focused on increasing field-based capacity for partnership development, improving internal and external communications around partnerships, and facilitating the implementation of priority national-level partnerships in virtually every region of the agency.  

Before working with the National Partnership Office, Joe spent a year as a policy analyst in Research and Development.  Joe also completed detail assignments at the national level developing a program performance scorecard, and with the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forests, where he created a comprehensive public engagement strategy for an 80,000 acre integrated land management project.  

Joe has also spent time on fire assignments in Colorado and California as a public information officer. Before coming to the Forest Service in 2010, Joe spent six years in broadcast television working as an on-air meteorologist and environmental reporter. A highlight of his time in that field was closely analyzing and communicating the effects of three landfalling Central Florida hurricanes to the local community in 2004. 

Joe holds a bachelor’s in Meteorology from Florida State University and a master’s in Public Administration from Florida Atlantic University.