2022 Schedule – Central Time

Many tools and datasets exist to strategically inform land conservation and park creation. These tools have a robust suite of datasets that can be used for achieving other goals as well. Historically, equity-based programs often base their recruitment on low resolution data such as zip code, essays, and self-reported socioeconomic information. Now, using the robust set of data in the Trust for Public Land’s (TPL) ParkServe mapping application, participants can be screened using data about their street and neighborhoods to determine those who are most impacted by environmental inequities and for whom participation could prove the critical difference in advancing conservation and climate justice. The Sonoma Land Trust (SLT) is using the TPL’s ParkServe mapping platform to inform community engagement by enhancing outreach, empowering disproportionately impacted communities, and elevating marginalized voices. This session will focus on opportunities presented by advanced mapping datasets to inform equity-based education and community programs. TPL will provide an overview and demonstration of the equity metrics included in the ParkServe database. SLT will demonstrate how they’ve used this tool to better inform outreach, community engagement, and program participant selection. The session will end with a live testimonial by a youth program participant via Zoom and a short workshop with attendees using the application to explore how equity metrics could inform their practices in their own city. At the end of the workshop, attendees will be encouraged to share their learnings via the conference app or Twitter.

How can the stories of our connection to place help us bridge gaps? How can land provide us a canvas for healing and justice? How can we rebuild and redefine the conservation space to be more relationship based and less transactional? How do we talk about conservation without saying conservation? The Montezuma Land Conservancy (MLC) has been expanding innovative community conservation programs in Southwest Colorado and deepening its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion for the past four years. Recently this work has grown into a budding relationship with the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe with the hiring of our first ever Cross-Cultural Programs Manager, Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk. As a previous Tribal Councilwoman and former co-chair of the Bear’s Ears Intertribal Coalition, Regina has brought a wealth of experience and perspective to the land trust and helped to advance this necessary work. This process has connected MLC to community members, elders, and Tribal departments to focus reconciliation and trust building through cross-cultural program development and exploration of our shared connections to land. The lessons and challenges have extended beyond just working with the Tribe and have helped MLC broaden its perspective on conservation and organizational development. Join Regina, MLC's executive director, Travis Custer, and Olga Gonzalez, long-time non-profit leader and equity consultant for this interactive session. During this session we’ll share how these lessons have helped to influence the organization's leadership, culture, and conservation planning and discuss how we can challenge ourselves to think differently about how we define conservation work and build equity into our organizations.

The Black River, long considered a priceless ecological and cultural resource to the state of South Carolina, has emerged as a critically important asset for advancing economic progress, flood resilience, and community health in one of the most neglected regions of the state. The navigable portions of the Black River, stretching 125 miles exclusively within SC, is one of the most beautiful and under-utilized rivers in the state with the potential to offer residents and visitors a wilderness-quality experience along a coastal-plain river. This community-led vision encompasses a network of Parks stretching 70 miles along the Black River. The water trail and park network will create a unique experience for visitors and a unparalleled economic opportunity for the region. The wholistic conservation initiative along the Black River has obvious habitat connectivity, recreation and economic development opportunities. However, the secondary benefits for human resilience, including drinking water security and flood mitigation, are equally profound and important.

Building community partnerships that support common goals, leverage resources and create better outcomes is a priority for most organizations and agencies. Integrating wellness, science, agricultural career pathways, social equity, and engaging content digital content provides a unique opportunity to equip our students and community members with a relevant and meaningful connection and appreciation for stewardship of the environment, while providing valuable real-world experiences. Some partnerships continue to grow and develop over time until the sky is the limit. Others putter out and fail. Learn why it’s worth exploring partnerships to achieve equitable outdoor access in your region, how to get started, how to evaluate your success and see some examples for how this has been done in Solano County, California.

Over the last 100 years, the number of African American farm-operators has plummeted from nearly 1,000,000 to a little over 45,000 today, now making up only 1.3 percent of producers, according to USDA Census of Agriculture. This decline is no accident but a result of years of discrimination and unequal opportunities. While the problem is huge, land trusts can play an important part in changing this dynamic. Join Ebonie Alexander, Black Family Land Trust, and Mary Burke, Land Trust Alliance, as they discuss how we got to this point and the current challenges facing African American farmers Participants will also have the opportunity of hearing first-hand from Joe Thompson, a former tobacco farmer and one of the only FRPP easements in the programs history. Filled with real-life stories and practical tips, this workshop is a must for land trusts who want to help families keep their land. This workshop will cover: --What land trusts need to know when reaching out to the African American farming community, including simple strategies to build trust --The nuts and bolts of Heirs’ Property, including why it is a problem and how Maryland passed the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA) --What small acreage landowners can do to keep their land assets as performing assets.

This workshop centers the voice, goals, 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, 22 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 re-distribution 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.

The Native Land Trust Council partners will explain how to work with federally-recognized tribes and native land trusts by bringing representatives to the table and expanding land conservation, protect landscapes, watershed, sacred sites, traditional use areas, and cultural resources through partnerships. NLTC will discuss the application of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge to mitigate climate change (ocean acidification, sea level rise, drought, extreme fire, and wind events, etc.) impacts on their lands

The Perpetuity Principle has been developed over the past 4 years to help guide promising practices and better programming for the K-12 Land Trust Community of Practice. In this workshop participants will explore how every land trust can have an enduring K-12 Perpetuity Program. In March 2020 we launched the Learning Landscapes K-12 Leadership Summit with 15 land trusts from Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Maine, New York, Michigan, Wyoming, Idaho and California. Through the pandemic commitments were made and programs forged. Summits in 2020, 2021, and 2022 were integrated with monthly support sessions to deepen purpose and extend practices. Specific Perpetuity Program Practices include: - Purpose - Perpetuity Atlas: Program Mapping an Enduring Design - Equity, Diversity, Justice, and Inclusion - Collective Evaluation: Logic Model, Theory of Change, and Outcomes & Impacts - Place-based Learning and Stewardship: Climate - Proximity & Frequency: GreenSchoolyards & Near Nature

Western Reserve Land Conservancy is the result of 13 mergers of traditional land trusts that worked in predominantly white, affluent places in Northeast Ohio. In 2008 the organization began a journey to learn how to serve cities and densely urbanized places such as Cleveland, OH. This resulted in the creation of urban programs, and a deep commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice. The mission transformation from exurban to holistic has been incredibly successful. Learn from four leaders how this evolution happened. Lessons learned. Insights gained. Friction encountered and overcome. The racial diversification of our board and staff. How to move from a charitable framework to a reciprocal framework of relationships in urban areas and distressed communities. The session will focus on deep and enduring partnerships with Black-founded and Black-led organizations, Rid All Green Partners and the Khnemu Foundation.

There has been an increase in global awareness around Indigenous People’s stewardship in land and water initiatives, leadership role in climate change and recognition of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge over the past few years. This responsibility has always been given to the Indigenous People since time immemorial, however, many triggering events and the severity of the state of the planet have increased the interest in non-Native communities partnering with Native Communities. Right relationship is key to working with Native Communities and to do so, there must be an understanding of protocols, acknowledgements and a willingness to set things right. This session is an offering to those who want to learn what work needs to be done on an individual and organizational level in order to be able to show up as a good partner to Indigenous Peoples.

Regardless of our beliefs, our religious faith – or lack thereof – shapes our core sense of identity and influences all aspects of our lives. As land trust professionals seeking to connect on a personal level with our volunteers, donors, landowners, land users, and others in our communities, we often overlook the spiritual beliefs that drive many conservationists. In so doing, we may miss key opportunities to bridge divides and forge lasting partnerships that have the power to advance our missions, perhaps in unexpected ways. In this workshop, you will hear from a panel of land trust leaders engaged in conservation with very different communities. Each panelist’s organization has partnered successfully with their local faith communities to inspire action, secure support from key constituencies, and ultimately benefit all partners.

The Mariposa Creek Parkway Initiative is a model for multi benefit community conservation in which the central riparian corridor of a community is the anchor and epicenter of partnership building. This session will describe how a local land trust, Tribe, local government, and arts organizations are working together to address community needs including land preservation, restoration incorporating Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Tribal engagement, housing, recreation, and economic development. The project partners will detail lessons learned including keys to partnership development and addressing pain points. Lear about multi-stakeholder project structure, diversifying financing and resource development. Sierra Foothill Conservancy (SFC) and partners will describe their roles in the planning, acquisition of property, funding structure, and how securing the land enabled a cascade of benefits, including innovative partnership development, restoration (in the form of fuels management, native planting, invasive removal), education, affordable housing, economic vitality, and the arts. The Mariposa Creek Parkway Initiative is a transformational community partnership amongst the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation, County of Mariposa, Mariposa Arts Council, community development organizations and non-profit affordable housing developers and the local trust which can serve as a model for the pluralistic future of conservation.

One-fifth of America. That’s the fraction of the population living in America’s inner suburbs, places that by definition border our largest cities and have a housing stock half or more of which is pre-1970. Many are experiencing social, economic, and environmental decline owing to poor land use planning, aging infrastructure, deindustrialization, and the deconcentration of poverty from city to suburb. This is certainly the case in Baltimore County where NeighborSpace has been working for 20 years. In fact, an entire book has been written chronicling the decline of the County’s inner suburbs. This decline has provoked calls for “retrofitting” the inner suburbs, redesigning existing communities into more sustainable places. In this workshop, we will show how open space figures prominently into this debate, a discussion in the forefront currently because of the County’s decennial update of its Master Plan and related laws and regulations. NeighborSpace has been a key player in the current debate, owing to the depth of expertise among its board and staff in the areas of design, planning, and law. We have argued that for retrofitting to succeed, County laws, policies and budgets must evolve to embrace open space as an organizing, networking, and place-making element that shapes and enhances communities and has good equitable access for all. This workshop will highlight specific principles, policies, and practices necessary to achieve this vision and the benefits of doing so.