Designing a Suburban Food Forest

(I am new to the forum, so please excuse any breaches in etiquette - any/all suggestions welcome!)

I am in the visioning phase of transforming the suburban lawn of my family's home (in Tacoma, WA; zone 9a) into a perennial food forest. It is a little more than 1/3 acre, mainly grass/lawn, though there is also an established garden and some fruit trees and shrubs.

I would love to connect with others locally to swap knowledge, plants, etc. - and I very much invite collaboration for this project. So any folks in Western WA, reach out! I'm also wondering if there are handy online resources for the design process - I was thinking of making a list of potential species, each with their own icon, to be dragged & dropped onto the site map to make guild design easy. Does this already exist? If not, I can create & share.

Any guidance is much appreciated - for this project, connecting to helpful resources, and with navigating this forum.

Welcome Casey:
        I am near by but also far away; as you know there is a Narrows Bridge and a lot of water in-between.  Due to age and finances I am not driving that far and I have not tried to keep in touch with the groups over there.  
A Google search for permaculture Tacoma WA reveals that the Meetup group is still active and the Facebook page is still active.  Also a reddit post just like yours so perhaps it was you.
I am active here and open to mentoring.  Suggestion if you would like to have a pecan tree the trees across the street from ST Joseph hospital  drop a lot of seed which sprout and grow readily in our climate.
You can also use the links in my signature line to contact me.

Thanks, Hans! I had reached out to both the FB and Meetup groups and hadn't heard back, so not sure if they are currently active. But I'll keep poking around. The offer for mentorship is greatly appreciated - I'll shoot you an email if I have more specific questions, and particularly when I get to the place of choosing plants and propagating. And I'll check out those pecans!!

I'm down in Camas, too far for a meetup but I'm happy to share what I've learned, (and plant materials, if you're ever down this way). I have a half acre food forest that is about 15 years old. Overall it is doing great. I have 156 varieties of perennial edible plants.

Hi, Dave, thanks for the offer as well!  I will definitely let you know if I'm ever passing through and would love to learn from your experience. Do you have a list of your edible perennials that's easy to share?

Casey Wing wrote:Hi, Dave, thanks for the offer as well!  I will definitely let you know if I'm ever passing through and would love to learn from your experience. Do you have a list of your edible perennials that's easy to share?

Sure, I will send it in a PM