Cultivating Millennial Leaders

Secure your land trust’s future by learning about this generation.

Liz Brownlee, age 33, blends life as a sustainable farmer in rural Indiana with 20 hours a week as the executive director of the Oak Heritage Conservancy. Sometimes this means taking a phone call as director while making the two-hour drive back to the farm from the butcher, hauling 275 whole chickens in coolers in the back of her truck. 

Since Brownlee began her position as the Oak Heritage Conservancy’s only staff member four-and-a-half years ago, the land trust has added two board members under the age of 30 to its eight-member board. “Having peers on the board is valuable to me as a staff member, but is also incredibly valuable to us as an organization,” Brownlee says. The conservancy’s dedication to these younger board members and staffer is an investment in the forward-looking nature of its mission. 

Land trusts are always thinking of the future because they promise to protect the land they conserve forever, Brownlee says. Who will do this work? "Not just land trusts, but every nonprofit organization is thinking: How do we create the next generation of leaders and the next  generation of donors?"

Being a young leader at a land trust is still the exception rather than the rule. That's why Brownlee was surprised and delighted to find herself in a small discussion group at Rally 2016: The National Land Conservation Conference in Minneapolis with Rebecca Dahl, age 28, Zenda Farms program director for the New York-based Thousand Islands Land Trust (accredited) and Lianna Lee, age 29, communications specialist for the Northern Forest Center, which works in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York.

The three women bonded over a shared feeling, tinged with loneliness, of being the only millennial-age staffer at a small land trust. They kept in touch after Rally, connected by a shared question: “Where are the rest of us?”

Brownlee, Dahl and Lee wanted to build a community of millennials working for land trusts, where “millennial” is defined as anyone born between 1980 and 1996, as described in Pew Research Center reports and other sources. The first step, they decided, was a survey that would go out to Land Trust Alliance members.

Alliance staff helped the group frame the survey questions, distribute the survey through the Alliance’s digital newsletter and discussion boards on the Alliance’s Learning Center, and collect the responses. “We are grateful for how responsive the Alliance staff has been,” says Lee. 

Over 500 millennials responded. Alison Delaney, age 37, development officer at the accredited Peconic Land Trust in Southampton, New York, was one of them. She had never self-identified as a millennial, as she didn’t see herself or her peers in the negative ways that stereotypes paint millennials as entitled and selfish.

However, after she attended the session on the millennial survey at Rally 2018 in Pittsburgh, she was won over by the spirit behind the survey and its findings to identify as a millennial. At the presentation, Brownlee, Dahl and Lee described millennials, not in terms of negative stereotypes, but as people in a demographic group who share similar cultural experiences. 

In the past 20 years, private college tuition rose 154%, while public college tuition rose by 221%, according to U.S. News & World Report. Millennials graduated with the greatest burden of college debt of any previous generation and the 2008 financial crisis set them back even further financially, according to a Pew Research Center report.

In this, Delaney recognized her own generation. When she spoke with Brownlee, Dahl and Lee after the presentation about getting involved in their effort on behalf of millennials, she found herself standing next to Chrissy Beardsley Allen, age 39, development director at Maine’s accredited Blue Hill Heritage Trust. Allen and Delaney were seamlessly folded into the group. The five women collaborated to write the Developing the Millennial Leaders That Land Trusts Need report based on the survey, which was released to Alliance members in April 2019.

Core Millennial Values

“The survey was open-ended; we didn’t want to force the narrative,” Dahl says. “We got back impassioned responses. Clearly, millennials at land trusts were looking for a platform to talk about these issues. The results are about how to bring talented staff to your land trust, and what you need to do to keep them long term.”

The authors arranged their top findings into eight pillars for developing millennial leaders. These pillars include relevance to millennial values, many of which overlap with the mission of land trusts. Diversity is another key millennial value, the survey found. Lee explains that this doesn’t just mean racial diversity, although that is important. A land trust that is diverse, according to the millennials surveyed, serves and includes people of different racial, cultural, socioeconomic and generational backgrounds.

“For the conservationists of color out there, and community members who sometimes feel as if they don’t belong in land conservation, you were seen and heard in this survey,” Lee says. “A diversity of lived experiences can help land trusts remain relevant into the future.” 

Record-setting levels of student debt influence the way millennials look at health insurance, salary and benefits, the report says. Employees of all generations want to be paid fairly and want to be able to live on their salaries. But millennials, statistically, have never recovered from the combination of high student debt and the recession that put them on shakier financial ground at the start of their careers. The report notes: “Millennials, as a block, work the same, owe more and make less.”

If meeting these needs sounds expensive, it doesn't have to be. Dahl says, "There are a lot of creative ways to make a better work environment." Benefits like flexible work schedules, working from home, and time in nature are additional benefits millennials value, the survey shows. 

The report includes questions to help land trusts assess their own strengths and weaknesses in developing millennial leadership. Invite your staff to lunch, Lee suggests, and you’ll not only get feedback important to your land trust’s future, you’ll create a warmer environment and demonstrate a culture of gratitude, too (another value appreciated by millennials).

Making Adjustments

Blue Hill Heritage Trust (BHHT) illustrates many of these pillars. BHHT was founded in 1985 by a group of people who ranged in age from their 20s to their 70s. Its 80% donor retention rate is incredible, says Allen. But this loyalty meant, as the decades passed, that donors, staffers and board members grew older as BHHT itself did.

“When I came on,” Allen says, “I was part of a push to become a more community-focused organization.” At the time, Allen was 20 years younger than anyone else on staff. BHHT realized that having younger staffers who understood their peers’ values, such as equal opportunities for open space, food equality issues and climate change, is important to its community focus. 

Addressing BHHT’s relevance to the community was another, early part of this push, Allen says. Like many land trusts, BHHT faced a false idea in its community that land trusts just protect the views of rich people. It needed to work to show community members the truth, that land trusts protect the places that are important to everyone. “It worked,” Allen says.

BHHT also adjusted its policies to make it a better place for younger staffers to work. Board meetings were scheduled so parents could tuck their young children into bed. Staffers became eligible for retirement benefits after one year of employment, instead of after several years.

Allen found the retirement benefit particularly powerful, especially since salaries and benefits tend to be minimal in the nonprofit world. “It felt totally different,” she says. “I was being treated like an adult for the first time.”

Connecting Peers to Place

The accredited Gallatin Valley Land Trust (GVLT) experiences the balancing act of land conservation a little more extremely than most. The Bozeman, Montana, region has been the fastest-growing area of fewer than 50,000 people in the nation for two years in a row, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But the area’s main attraction is its wide open spaces.

“Everybody who loves living here has a connection to our mission,” says EJ Porth, age 32, GVLT’s communication and outreach director and manager/coordinator of the NextGen Advisory Board. But with newcomers pouring into the region, how could GVLT make the connection that the land trust is responsible for keeping the area’s natural beauty accessible to all?

GVLT’s NextGen Advisory Board is an important outreach tool. It’s a group of developing conservation leaders who, at the moment, range in age from 21 to 45, although most are in the 28- to 35-age range, Porth says.

“They raise awareness of what we do in the community, connecting people to place, especially among their peers,” Porth says. The group helps GVLT reach new people, understand its community, engage donors, host events and develop future leaders.

The NextGen Advisory Board also provides feedback and a different perspective to GVLT’s board of directors. For example, it steered the board toward focusing on diversity and inclusion during its strategic planning process. 

It’s difficult for people who are building both careers and families to commit to volunteering. “Beer helped,” Porth says, only half-jokingly. In the NextGen’s early years, about four years ago, a member owned a brew pub and meetings were often held there. More recently, there are events like a costumed scavenger hunt on bikes. “It’s silly and fun,” Porth says. 

And it’s working. This year GVLT received 34 applications for 10 open volunteer spots in the group, Porth says.

Developing Millennial Donors

In some ways, developing millennials as donors is not that much different from developing donors of older generations, Delaney says. Reaching young people, even if they haven't accumulated significant wealth, is important for cultivating future giving, she and Allen say. 

An important step toward reaching digital-first donors, whether they are millennials or baby boomers, is through an online donation form on your website, Delaney says. Also, for the first generation of digital natives, the social and competitive nature of an online crowd-funding campaign “is fun and works,” Allen says.

Allen created a successful “40 Under 40” campaign for Blue Hill Heritage Trust. The price of admission for a brewery event was a membership at any level. 

But while millennials—or any donors—may come for the beer, they stay for the mission. “We have to prove why we are  an organization worth donating to,”  Allen says. That means showing how  land trusts are doing the work millennials care about. For example, allaying climate change is a value many millennials share. Land trusts do this work in many ways, including when they conserve wetlands that capture carbon. Land trusts need to connect those dots for millennial donors and prospective donors.

Connecting with millennial donors also means showing that your land trust reflects the diversity of the community it serves, which is as true for donors as staffers and board members, the report team has found. “We want everyone to be able to look at our organization and see themselves reflected,” Allen says. 

In this meeting of personal and generational values with a land trust’s mission, millennials are no different from other generations. Values connect staffers, board members and donors to your organization.

“We all want to be with people who  share our values,” says Brownlee. After years away from her rural Indiana home, the Oak Heritage Conservancy was the first to say, “We’d like you to get involved.” 

“It made me feel wanted,” Brownlee says. “I recognized it as a place where I can make a difference. I may be young, but I think that’s what all humans want.”

Madeline Bodin is a frequent contributor to Saving Land.

Photos:

1. Liz Brownlee of Oak Heritage Conservancy. Photo credit: Oak Heritage Conservancy.

2. Blue Hill Heritage Trust has adjusted its policies to make it a better place for younger staffers to work. Photo credit: Blue Hill Heritage Trust

3. Gallatin Valley Land Trust’s NextGen Advisory Board is made up of developing conservation leaders who raise awareness of what it does in the community, connecting people to place, especially among their peers. Photo credit: Kelly Kuntz Photography