Articles

Lori Ensinger served on the board of the Westchester Land Trust in New York for nine years, but it wasn’t until she joined the staff as president that she realized how much she didn’t know about the land trust’s work.

In accepting our responsibilities for protecting land in perpetuity, land trusts are rightly focused on ensuring we have financial capacity to defend easements and recordkeeping systems that will serve to inform future generations.

Is your land trust considering a capital campaign? Then it’s time to read Story Clark’s advice on capital campaigns from A Field Guide to Conservation Finance.

Fatty bacon, gossiping hummingbirds, well-mannered cows and bullwhip-cracking archeologists — all are topics you wouldn’t expect to find in a membership email from a land trust. But each of these found their way into the creative and delightfully absurd emails sent out by land trust staff.

Lindsay Pett us has spent much of his life in Lancaster County, South Carolina, near the Catawba River. With each passing decade, he’s watched the river grow increasingly threatened by development in nearby counties. In 1995 he decided enough was enough. He launched the Katawba Valley Land Trust (KVLT) and vowed to protect the watershed and its lands or generations to come.

Board members of all-volunteer land trusts forge strong bonds with their communities.