About two dozen people attended the first public forum of Transition Catskills, a group dedicated to making the Catskills more economically resilient, on Wednesday night at the Open Eye Theater in Margaretville.

“This was our first effort to organize a conversation,” said Jeff Tomasi, a former partner at Goldman Sachs who helped found the group.

There will be another film screening and public forum for the Transition Catskills movement on Saturday, July 26, at 4 p.m. at the Roxbury Arts Center in Roxbury.

Tomasi, who owns a second home in the Delaware County town of Middletown, also lives in London, where he first got word of Transition, an initiative that began in England around 2006 and addressed issues of oil dependence and economic instability.

“I’m not a leader, I’m a facilitator,” Tomasi told the group. “I’m not here to tell people how to live. Just here to start the dialogue.”

The fourth annual Catskill Forest Festival will celebrate the region’s forests this weekend by inviting people to participate in fun that promises to also be educational.

The festival, held in Margaretville Village Park on Saturday, July 26, will provide an array of family fun including music, games, horse rides and a food, beverage and vendor tent. 

In the spirit of the festival, vendors will be selling an assortment of crafts made from wood and other forest materials including hand-crafted furniture, boats, wood and pellet stoves and furnaces. Present will also be vendors selling maple products. 

The festival will be host to educational presentations by experts on subjects pertaining to the importance of New York forests such as bringing back near extinct trees and woody biomass opportunities for heating communities. There will also be talks about the history of the eastern golden eagle and forestry for wildlife.