2023 Schedule – Pacific Time

How can land trusts and nature organizations be a part of public health solutions? Research documenting the health benefits of nature continues to grow, yet many communities still face barriers to accessing nature and a clean environment due to historic and present systemic injustices. Join this workshop to explore how you can help improve health equity in your community. Dive into some of the latest national research on the health benefits of nature since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, tools for implementing a “Health, Equity and Nature Report” in your community and strategies and ideas for implementing community-centered solutions. Explore how these strategies worked (and what didn’t work!) in the Chicago region. You’ll learn why interdisciplinary partnerships are vital to success, including public health institutions, environmental justice organizers, artists and funders and how to ensure community voices guide the process.

This year, Southern Oregon Land Conservancy teamed up with Unete Center for Farmworker Advocacy and Southern Oregon Climate Action Now to develop and pilot the “Youth Climate Protectors” program. This program, fully funded by the Oregon Health Authority, introduced local Latino/a/x high school students to the science of climate change, then took them out to a number of public and private protected lands where they learned about the human/land relationship, explored land-based career pathways and collaborated on climate change-related community action projects. In this session, we will discuss the process of developing the program; the enthusiastic funding and partnering responses we enjoyed; the crucial role of cross-sector collaboration in bringing the program to fruition; the lessons we learned; and the future of the program. We will also share reflections and insights from participants about their experience. We will finish the session with activities that will help participants articulate their “why” for engaging youth in their organization’s work, and will help participants think creatively about potential collaborators beyond typical land trust networks.

Rural development helps provide social and economic opportunities to residents in rural communities to improve quality of life and livability. But how can you use rural development as a tool to support rural communities and advance conservation opportunity? In this workshop, we will learn what rural development is, how it can be tied to recreation and conservation opportunity and hear about multiple case studies from Western Montana and Idaho. We will then have an interactive session with participants to explore how this work could be used as a tool for land trusts beyond the West.

Preserves seeking to be more inclusive may struggle to help those with limited mobility (e.g., those using wheelchairs or canes, those with conditions impacting coordination or balance, or even those just pushing a stroller) connect with nature. While the shared use paths favored by many designers can guarantee universal access, these can be very expensive and have significant impacts. Too often, organizations are limited to building a short path around a field. We draw from real-world experience as users facing mobility challenges and as program leaders seeking to improve access. We describe the kinds of natural paths that users facing different mobility challenges can potentially learn to enjoy, and consider the other trail features and amenities that create memorable experiences. We also consider the range of amenities at the trailhead to ensure the comfort of users, and share emerging ideas for the kinds of information users need to plan their outing. Developing a plan to identify potential trails can be an opportunity to recruit accessibility ambassadors who can provide specific feedback, as part of other efforts related to accessibility. Conducting an inventory of candidate trails across a county or region can help to focus funding to demonstrating feasibility. These efforts may ultimately depend on building relationships with organizations serving individuals with various mobility challenges. We describe this process through our own efforts to conduct accessibility reviews of trails, take specific action steps to improve specific trails and begin to develop regional goals that help direct the resources needed.

The Trust for Public Land has just completed an 18-month community-centered effort to integrate California’s Pathways to 30x30, Regional Conservation Investment Strategies, and other governmental climate and conservation plans in California’s Central Coast region into a Blueprint. This effort aims to guide climate action involving diverse community interests and focuses on balancing biodiversity conservation, equitable access, and climate resilience. This work involved assembling and assessing national, state, and regional-scale spatial data along with expert opinion from scientists, conservation practitioners, rural community members, and Tribal groups, which we integrated into a suite of conservation focus areas and strategies. These efforts will continue to facilitate partnerships, improve funding alignment with existing sources of funds, and support future conservation finance initiatives. In this session, we will share our approach, outcomes and lessons learned, and provide a basic framework for similar efforts in other regions.

This session will explore the benefits of collaborative efforts to address conservation and housing affordability needs in a community. Conservation and affordable housing groups have common interests: to put development where it belongs and protect land from being developed in ways that do not serve natural resource conservation or housing access/affordability goals. Land trusts can serve new community members by collaborating with and learning from affordable housing organizations. In this session, we will share examples from across the country of different ways that conservation and housing groups have worked together. You will learn about: the range of tools that conservation land trusts and affordable housing organizations can use to support community goals; concepts a land trust needs to know to successfully work with affordable housing organizations; what community land trusts and land banks are; and ideas for how your land trust can identify new partners and advance conservation, housing, and community needs.

This workshop centers the voice, goals and perspectives of the Indigenous leadership behind two large-scale collaborations involving land trusts that are sharing land and resources and that are part of the land back movement. We will look at two large-scale collaborations among land trusts and Indigenous nations in Maine and Oregon to learn how to build relationships, move at the speed of trust, to return land and to bring the best minds together to care for land. On separate sides of the continent, dozens of land trusts have organized themselves into significant collaborations, pooling knowledge, money and skills to be in service to Indigenous Nations around access to land, land returns and cultural wellbeing. First Light is a collaboration between hundreds of leaders, 65 organizations and Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet and Micmac Communities working with the understanding that we are stronger together: many organizations might be able to achieve what one organization could not. Through moving at the speed of trust, these land trusts have returned a thousand acres and granted legal access to 78,000 acres with much more to come. In Oregon, 15 land trusts have come together to form the Oregon Land Justice Project whose mission is to partner with Indigenous Nations to reclaim and reconnect to their traditional landscapes and first foods. Both collective efforts aspire to reciprocity: to expand Indigenous access, presence and relationship to land for our collective wellbeing and to create a stronger conservation movement that includes and reflects Indigenous expertise. All will benefit from this, and it all begins with a more equitable redistribution of land and resources.We will share the motivations, structures and results of this work that is redefining what land trusts do, what conservation means, and promises to reform the relationship between conservation and Indigenous nations.

As the urgency for increased protection of our nation's natural resources accelerates and gains attention through initiatives such as President Biden's 30x30, so is the need for deeper and more authentic community engagement. Learn from four experienced conservation practitioners who have entered this space in South Carolina and are leading by listening. Case studies of projects that have involved land acquisition, community building, climate solutions, equitable access, preservation of culture and advocacy will be presented and will demonstrate how synergies can be found if one is open to collaboration.

Learn about how to create strategic planning objectives for developing and executing new or expanding programming, cultivate meaningful community partnerships and implement community-engaged programming. This workshop will review how Shirley Heinze Land Trust was able to build organizational capacity and develop meaningful partnerships to create and implement new community-engaged programming in the urban and rural areas of its geography. Hear perspectives from staff at different levels of the organization as the executive director reviews planning and organizational visioning to develop new strategic programming, project manager discusses identifying partners and building trust in new communities as well as creating efficiencies to build capacity, and programs coordinator outlines how to develop and implement programs and gathering community feedback on program effectiveness. The workshop will include a live breakout discussion where participants will play out real life examples of challenging community engagement scenarios. The session will wrap with a question and answer session with staff as well as board and advisory council members involved in the organization’s urban and agricultural community outreach and programming.

Too-often community managed urban spaces are presented in an almost utopian light, obfuscating the often messy, iterative on the ground reality. But what is the cost of this gap between image and reality? It ends up favoring capital over human investment, disappears community labor, emphasizes instrumental outcomes and simplifies complex community stories. So how might we share a more complete story of community-managed spaces, one that captures their full value and makes visible their too-often hidden benefits? One strategy is to reframe community stewarded spaces as an important part of cities’ social infrastructure—physical spaces, organizations and actions that support civic life. This workshop will delve into the building blocks of social infrastructure first through the prism of community gardens in Chicago and then through a breakout exercise where participant will be invited to diagram how other urban open spaces function (and don’t) as social infrastructure. Research has found that civic stewardship groups activate green space to function as social infrastructure in a range of important ways. Stewards foster friendships, associations and social cohesion. They create gathering spaces and enliven them with place-based and culturally relevant programming and engage in community organizing and planning. There is not one magic framework that will tell the true story of community gardens, but it is crucial that we pay attention to the profound work occurring in community-managed spaces, and tell the story that does these efforts justice. For the Chicago case studies, we will share how a team of practitioners and researchers from the Central Park Conservancy institute for Urban Parks, NeighborSpace (land trust), Borderless (design studio) and the USDA Forest Service – Northern Research Station, developed diagrams which visualize the visible and invisible systems at play and more fully communicate the outcomes and benefits of community managed spaces.

The recently-completed Fifeville Community Trail reconnects a historically Black neighborhood in the heart of Charlottesville, VA to a park that is the neighborhood’s cultural core, while linking residents of all ages to jobs and shopping via a low-stress alternative to busy streets that lack sidewalks. This community-led project restores a historic connection that was severed by Urban Renewal and is part of a larger effort by the community to preserve their neighborhood and improve community health. As corollary, the project opened for public enjoyment a privately owned forested property that includes a stream, wildlife and historic resources. The project is remarkable because of the close partnership between diverse community groups, the City of Charlottesville, a landowner and multiple foundations–with a land trust (the Piedmont Environmental Council) as a catalytic partner. The session will include social, historic and geographic orientation, first-hand accounts from local leaders via a recorded panel discussion, a summary of strategies for translating good will to on-the-ground change and a workshop on how these ingredients could be successful in session attendees’ practices and communities.

Few scholarly programs provide the practical experience and hands-on training required to enter the field of conservation, outside of academia. However, the majority of jobs lie outside of the academy. Programs that provide quality training to a diverse group of young people are essential for the sustainability of our field and can be accomplished by a multitude of conservation organizations. The Conservation Leader Internship Program (CLIP) is a paid summer internship that provides underserved, first-generation, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ youth with hands-on professional training in the field of conservation. Participants gain experience in areas such as plant identification, land management, GIS/GPS training, prescribed fire training, herbicide use, plant monitoring, wildlife surveys, sustainable farming techniques, land preservation techniques, field safety, scientific research, art in the natural world, career development and professional networking. Collectively, these skills give each participant a strong understanding of the field of conservation and serve as a springboard for a professional career in the field of conservation. Program outcomes were measured by a series of check-ins, surveys, blog posts and skill tests throughout the entirety of the program. CLIP students who entered the program with virtually no experience in the field of conservation, graduated the program feeling comfortable navigating the field as a professional. Graduates reported feelings of increased confidence, a strong understanding of the field of conservation and the ability to continue their journey in this profession. In this workshop, learn about how you too can invest in the future of conservation by implementing CLIP at your organization.

There has been much discussion of and consternation at the statistics regarding the loss of farmland by Black farmers. In 1910, Black farmers owned approximately 16 million acres of farmland in the US, but as of the 2017 Census of Agriculture, farmers who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color owned less than 3 million acres.  This is the result of devastating and systemic racial discrimination, including Jim Crow laws and lynchings forcing migration, lack of access to capital and credit due to USDA discrimination, the theft of land held as heirs’ property, and corruption by the legal system.  We must make amends.

At the same time, American Farmland Trust tells us that there are 370 million acres of land changing hands in the next two decades.  While much of that land will be passed on via inheritance, speculation by developers, private investors and corporate agribusiness is driving up land prices and creating more barriers to land access for new and beginning farmers and farmers of color. 

A group of farmer activists decided to act at this critical juncture with the goals of helping underrepresented communities get access to rural land, supporting urban growers, and protecting the earth from the ravages of agribusiness. We began by blending the traditions from conservation land trust and community land trust worlds to create a hybrid called an “Agrarian Commons.”  Agrarian Trust acts as an ally, providing fundraising, legal and other support for local partner organizations, many of which are engaged in their own liberatory activities through farming.  In both urban and rural contexts, local projects are working to promote food sovereignty, preserve ecologically stewarded farmland in perpetuity, and provide affordable, long-term land tenure to farmers who face barriers to land access. Agrarian Trust continues to learn from our partners as we change and grow and strive to be better allies. 

Panel participants will hear inspiring stories of this hybrid land trust organization’s transformative journey, and what we and our local project leaders have learned as we make the crucial leap from theory to practice.  You will hear what we are grappling with legally and ethically in order to support the sovereignty of local communities.  Most importantly, participants will learn what this effort looks like on the ground, from a farmer and member of the board of the Central Virginia Agrarian Commons.  Panelists include Agrarian Trust staff, Agrarian Commons board members, a farmer, and attorneys helping develop and refine legal tools.

This session will detail a decades-long working relationship with the Religious Lands Roundtable group in Kentucky. This group was primarily comprised of three sects of sisters at three separate Motherhouses owning over 2,500 acres of land: Loretto Motherhouse, St. Catharine Farm and Sisters of Nazareth. These groups worked for years to determine which organization was the best fit, whether a conservation easement in perpetuity was right for their perpetual nature of the Motherhouse lands upon which their historic Motherhouse structures existed, and how to incorporate their visions for the future conservation practices and community engagement they intended to implement on their lands. This session will highlight the reciprocal nature of our educational relationship and the two wonderful projects that resulted after many, many years of negotiations with their international leadership groups within the Catholic Church. We will share the challenges when dealing with large not-for-profit organizations and the incredible benefits of protecting land that has a long history of conservation combined with a very progressive future vision for those lands. We will also detail how we were able to work through the many levels of decision-makers within these organizations to finally make it to the finish line with two of our most thoughtful and dynamic conservation easements in our 159-easement portfolio, as well as what happened to the land owned by one group of sisters who ultimately decided to sell their land to a farmer without protecting it a conservation easement.

The Chicago region's ready access to land, water and infrastructure is increasingly important as the climate crisis reshapes where and how food is grown, how community conservation is practiced and how our working lands are managed and protected. But this region is hampered by legacies of racism, disinvestment and political prioritizing of global economic models over local sustainability. Using the Chicago Region Food System Fund as a case study, we'll explore: How can a collaborative and concentrated response to a systemic shock lead to expanding and understanding of who is part of a food system- particularly across urban/rural, land use, and community divides? How can local communities be better prepared to address challenges to produce food, protect soil and water, and leverage government funding opportunities? How can land trusts apply COVID-19 lessons to the ongoing and increasing calamity of climate change and its profound reshaping of how our food is produced, distributed and consumed to be more ecologically sustainable and racially just? This workshop will be highly interactive with the presenters giving context, posing questions and facilitating group discussion. Participants should be motivated to experiment, brainstorm and take risks.

This workshop has been cancelled. This session will have a focus on the commons model, Indigenous collective stewardship and ownership of land, and regenerative agriculture. By creating Agrarian Commons throughout the US, which are a hybrid model of community and conservation land trust to hold farmland and housing, we are addressing the realities of farmland owner demographics, wealth disparities in the US, results of historic and present racial injustice, farm viability, the high price of land, and the impact on all who are excluded and marginalized from land and food. Each Commons permanently removes agricultural land from the commodity market, so it never risks being sold to the highest bidder. Affordable long-term leases allow farmers to have secure land tenure, helping farmers cultivate the security and financial viability to invest in farm infrastructure and long-term stewardship. Commons are structured in a way that ensures local stewardship and governance of land and keeps land in the hands of the community closest to it, including those farming. Participants will learn about the Black Swamp project and how the innovative Commons model works.  Panelists are land conservationists, farmers, and the Indigenous people leading the project. Attendees will hear inspiring stories of the transformation that is occurring around the country because of this new way of being in relationship to land and learn ways to be participants in the movement.