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? 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. 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. During this session we’ll share how these lessons have helped to influence MLC’s leadership, culture, and conservation planning and how we believe these lessons can be applied to your organization. We hope you’ll join us for this interactive session to challenge ourselves to think differently about how we define conservation. Together we will think of conservation in new ways, weave Indigenous perspectives throughout our work, and discuss how our organizations can act through a lens of relationship and reciprocity to each other and place.