About Land Trusts

— filed under: Community land trusts, conservation, Land transactions

Powerful Together.

For more than 100 years, local leaders in communities across America have been working to save the riverbanks, meadows, woodlands and family farms that are treasured places in their neighborhoods.

Then the leaders seized a powerful idea: to combine the local knowledge of people and places, the flexibility of the private sector, and the energy of volunteerism into one – they formed Land Trusts.

Today there are more than 1,700 land trusts working in communities across America. The Land Trust Alliance is the voice for the national land conservation community.

What is a Land Trust?

A land trust is a nonprofit organization that, as all or part of its mission, actively works to conserve land by undertaking or assisting in land or conservation easement acquisition, or by its stewardship of such land or easements.
Land trusts work with landowners and the community to conserve land by accepting donations of land, purchasing land, negotiating conservation agreements on land (called conservation easements), and stewarding conserved land through the generations to come.
A land trust works for conservation instead of the generation of profits through land sales.
Most land trusts are community-based and deeply connected to local needs, so they're well-equipped to identify land that offers critical natural habitat as well as land offering recreational, agricultural and other conservation value.

How does a Land Trust Work?

Land trusts work to implement three fundamentally American ideals:

Volunteerism
Community Spirit
Connection to the Land

By holding land or conservation easements on land with high conservation value, land trusts counter the economic model of poorly planned development and sprawl.

Land trusts communicate and demonstrate the powerful benefits of land on our lives and on the human spirit.

Making an Impact

The idea to work to maximize resources has spread rapidly. Today there are 1,700 land trusts that have more than 100,000 volunteers and 2 million members.

So far, land trusts have conserved 37 million acres of land in America – an area roughly the size of all the New England states combined.

When we work together to make land conservation a priority, we will hand to our children an intact and healthy landscape that can nourish and sustain all future generations.