SEM01: Building an Annual Fundraising Strategy: Plan the Work and Work the Plan
The backbone of any annual fundraising effort is entering the year with a set of clearly articulated goals, specific timelines, and income projections, and having the data and staff in place to execute. In this session, learn how to craft a robust annual operating plan that weaves together the essentials of major gifts, planned giving, fundraising appeals, conservation project needs and capital fundraising, events, grants, and more – all while centering the donor experience to ensure the donors keep coming back! Attendees will leave with an understanding of the essential building blocks that make up an annual fundraising plan, and with specific ideas to improve or implement at their organization for the upcoming year.
Session Location: Oregon Convention Center
Price: $150/$180
SEM02: Negotiating the Impossible
Land trusts often find themselves negotiating with a counterpart who has vastly more power and money. To prepare for this challenge, you will learn how to "negotiate the impossible" by developing power away from the negotiating table. Through a series of simulations, you will gain confidence in your negotiation skills and develop the interpersonal skills essential for successful negotiations by learning how to plan a negotiating strategy, anchor offers, create value and understand the difference between interests and positions. This seminar is drawn from a course taught by Rand Wentworth that won the Carballo Award for Excellence in Teaching at Harvard University.
Session Location: Oregon Convention Center
Price: $150/$180
SEM03: New Endeavors in Land Conservation: Conserve, Redevelop, Undevelop
This session focuses on land trusts as social entrepreneurs, shepherding the movement from large-scale, raw land protection to small-scale, interconnected repurposing of land and its uses. The presenters will share their new forms of conservation experiences engaging people of all backgrounds and abilities with land for outdoor recreation, agriculture and education as well as redeveloping already-built environments for new uses such as shelter, food sharing and gathering places; and undeveloping lands to support revitalized ecological and human systems, including sacred and foraging Indigenous spaces using conservation easements, cultural respect agreements, use agreements and other tools.
Session Location: Oregon Convention Center
Price: $150/$180
CLE: CLE
SEM04: Outdoors for Everyone: A Disability Inclusion Workshop
People with disabilities live in every community and cross every sector of society, yet the conservation movement has historically ignored people with disabilities. Let’s change that now! You can ensure that all people have access to and a voice in your conservation efforts. Through “Outdoors for Everyone” you will learn how to include people with disabilities in planning, strategy, communications, partnership development and implementation of all aspects of your land trust work. Inclusion of everyone shouldn’t be a separate effort for your organization, but instead can be integrated into the fabric of your land trust or agency. Members of the Land Trust Alliance Disability Council will explore authentic engagement across all sectors of disability: sensory, physical, intellectual, Autism Spectrum Disorder and mental health conditions and mental illness. You will learn how to engage people from various disability communities, tips for board engagement and policy development, preferred language and terms and legal responsibilities, as well as opportunities for outstanding ethical reforms. We will clarify how the tenets of Universal Design and provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act interact to help you plan accessible trails and develop programming to ensure access for everyone.
Session Location: Oregon Convention Center
Price: $150/$180
SEM05: Preventing Culture From Eating Strategy for Breakfast: A Simple Recipe for Organizational Health
Productive and sustainable organizations can trace their success to common and predictable sources: a clear and compelling vision, strong connections to the community, supportive organizational structures, healthy organizational culture and relevant and practical strategies. These characteristics are not acquired by chance – they are the by-product of intentional investment and focus on the things that matter. While many organizations focus on vision, structure and strategy, many find that the best-laid plans may never be realized unless there is an equal focus on elements of organizational culture.
Session Location: Oregon Convention Center
Price: $150/$180
SEM06: Reimagining Land Trusts as Leaders of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice
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, Ohio. 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 and why this evolution happened including lessons learned, insights gained, friction encountered and overcome and the racial diversification of their board and staff. Hear how to move from a charitable framework to a reciprocal framework of relationships in urban areas and distressed communities and how to address subconscious systemic oppression in the context of conservation funding and project selection. The seminar will focus on deep and enduring partnerships with Black-founded/Black-led organizations, particularly Rid-All Green Partnership and Black Environmental Leaders. Several case studies and real-life examples will bring to life this innovative work that engages forgotten communities that have never been served by the environmental conservation community.
Session Location: Oregon Convention Center
Price: $150/$180
SEM07: Relearning Our History to Better Show Up for Indigenous Peoples
For many of us, 9th grade US history is but a dim memory of patriotic founding fathers resisting British tyranny, manifest destiny guiding our forefathers’ efforts to “tame” the West and waves of immigrants creating a grand melting pot. We now know that wasn’t the whole story or even a particularly accurate story. We see time and again, those who hold power bury or brush aside painful and difficult events in American history and create systems that limit access to land and its benefits. Additionally, many narratives exclude the leadership and expertise of Indigenous Peoples throughout the history of land conservation. In this seminar presenters will unlock key moments in history that shape private land ownership and the conservation landscape we work in today, focusing on Indigenous Peoples. We will explore strategies to disrupt these systems and advance equity in our conservation practice. We will take a new look at the common land conservation tools and explore alternatives that center Indigenous leadership and access. Through stories and conversation, participants will begin to imagine what a new future for private land conservation might look like. The morning and afternoon sessions will have some content in common, but we will present it in different contexts.
Session Location: Oregon Convention Center
Price: $150/$180
SEM08: Flip the Script: Changing Attitudes about Fundraising
The single biggest impediment to our fundraising success is not with donors, but with ourselves. Attitude is everything and a bad attitude about fundraising can prevent people at your land trust from participating and enjoying the process. Fundraising also has a bad reputation - often well-earned - as catering to the wealthy without regard for the community. This workshop will focus on changing the culture within the organization to help how we approach fundraising to include more people in more ways and feel good about the contributions they can make. We will also explore ways to share the ownership of conservation success to the broader community, more equitably and inclusively. The conversation will lead to specific actions groups can take to more completely engage their fundraising team and others who now sit back, as well as how to engage their community more completely and authentically. Participants will be encouraged to rethink their current strategies and structures to provide more ways for more people to support the work of the land trust.
Session Location: Oregon Convention Center
Price: $150/$180
SEM09: Land Trusts Working Together for Indigenous Prosperity
In this session, we will examine two large-scale collaborations among land trusts in Maine and Oregon to relearn history, recenter Indigenous leadership and to return land, resources and access. 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. 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, fifteen 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. 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.
Session Location: Oregon Convention Center
Price: $150/$180
SEM10: Leadership Skills for Collaboration
Leading in the context of a collaborative effort presents special opportunities and challenges. This seminar will allow leaders active in collaborations to learn and apply specific network frameworks and approaches to their situation. Participants will leave with practical tools to energize their partnerships, examples from other collaborative efforts and a game plan to increase the impact and effectiveness of their collaborations.
Session Location: Oregon Convention Center
Price: $150/$180
SEM11: The Perpetuity Principle and K-12 Leadership Summit: Building Your Most Enduring Program
Learn about K-12 environmental education programs from across the country and workshop your own programming in a dedicated, collaborative environment. Since 2020, the Learning Landscapes K-12 Leadership Summit cohort has refined the Perpetuity Principle and incorporated them into land and community-based environmental education programs. These principles introduce a logical tie-in to ongoing advances regarding community-centered conservation and the concept of Perpetuity already present in land acquisition and stewardship. Land trusts from across the country have convened the last three years in order to actualize effective use of best practices, including DEIJ, program mapping, evaluation (both collective and individual), place-based learning and youth-led conversations around climate. This session will feature a concentrated version of the annual Summit, giving space for current land trust staff involved in or interested in youth environmental education to consult with similar programs after an explanation of the foundational logic and history of K-12 environmental education programming.
Session Location: Oregon Convention Center
Price: $150/$180
SEM12: Planning for Everything: The A to Z of Creating a Complete Conservation Plan
Join this comprehensive class on all the steps and stages necessary to create a complete conservation plan. Using examples from past conservation plans, the course will go through the step-by step process necessary to create a conservation plan and the different decisions and directions that may be taken along the way. It will cover the major steps of planning: from initial conceptualization and feasibility, to developing the lenses for understanding the issues before you, doing fact-finding and surveying, splitting and lumping community interests, doing appropriate research, refining your values, developing GIS maps, strategies and tactics for your conservation plan. Attendees will be provided with worksheets to help with developing their own plans. In-depth assistance will be on the "lenses" used to understand your regions and how to break them down and assess all aspects of your community's needs and then how to turn all aspects of that assessment into the needed working elements of a conservation plan, with a specific assessment on understanding the geographies of need and create a good GIS map-based strategy.
Session Location: Oregon Convention Center
Price: $150/$180
SEM13: Relearning Our History to Better Show Up for Black Communities
For many, our understanding of the history of Black communities comes from old lessons on the triangular trade system, plantations and the Civil Rights era that is overlaid with noxious cultural messages pushed out in movies, television and books that served to downplay the brutality and pervasiveness of racism. We see time and again, those who hold power bury or brush aside painful and difficult events in American history and create systems that resulted in limited access to land and its benefits, including the concentration of parks, trees and open space in predominantly affluent, white neighborhoods and a conservation industry that is predominantly white. Additionally, many narratives exclude the leadership and expertise of Black communities throughout the history of land conservation. In this seminar, presenters seek to daylight those narratives and expertise will unlocking key moments in history that shape private land ownership and the conservation landscape we work in today. We will explore strategies to disrupt these systems and advance equity in our conservation practice. We will take a new look at the common land conservation tools and explore alternatives that center the leadership and expertise of Black communities. Through stories and conversation, participants will begin to imagine what a new future for private land conservation might look like. The morning and afternoon sessions will have some content in common, but we will present it in different contexts.
Session Location: Oregon Convention Center
Price: $150/$180
SEM14: Sticks in the Bundle: What Are They Worth
The session will explore the concept of property rights and limitations on property rights that might be found in title reports. We will look at which sticks in the bundle of rights may have an impact on Highest and Best Use and ultimately, on market value. We will examine how these limitations might influence purchase or funding decisions. During the session participants will review several examples of exceptions and reservations from title reports and engage in a class discussion concerning how exceptions and reservations might influence Highest and Best Use and/or Market Value.
Session Location: Oregon Convention Center
Price: $150/$180
SEM15: Water Resources Issues in Western Conservation
This seminar will focus on current and emerging water resource issues in land and water conservation, including the challenges posed by climate change, aridification and hydrological variability. Presenters will walk participants through a complex ranch conservation opportunity involving multiple water rights and competing conservation values on adjacent private and public lands on an over-appropriated stream. Finally, the seminar will explore the use of conservation easements and other legal restrictions on the use of water to restore and sustain western rivers and aquifers. The presenters are practicing attorneys in the Rocky Mountain, Intermountain and Pacific Coastal states.
Session Location: Oregon Convention Center
Price: $150/$180
CLE: CLE