'The wind at our backs'

In 2021, North Coast Land Conservancy protected the 3,500acre Rainforest Reserve property, its “most ambitious conservation project to date and one of the largest private conservation projects ever on the Oregon coast,” says NCLC Executive Director Katie Voelke.

“It’s wild, it’s huge, it’s tall,” Voelke tells The Daily Astorian. “You’re in the clouds. You’re above the rain. All this incredible coastal wildness and it’s just right there.”

Together with an adjacent state park and marine reserve, the Rainforest Reserve forms a sea-to-summit conservation corridor that stretches 32 square miles from the crests of the Coast Range to the Pacific Ocean. Yet the project might not have come to fruition if not for a unique program known as Advancing Conservation Excellence, a 10-year effort of the Land Trust Alliance and the Yarg Foundation to accelerate the pace and scale of conservation in Oregon by investing in the state’s community of land trusts.

“One of the largest impacts the ACE program has had at NCLC was granting us money to use on an option payment for the Rainforest Reserve property,” says Voelke.

As one of the most recent and largest accomplishments for a land trust in the state, the Rainforest Reserve project is a fitting symbol of the ACE program’s success. But ACE has done far more than grant money to land trusts for conservation projects. According to Voelke, ACE funding helped NCLC professionalize its communications, expand expertise and increase technical capabilities. Voelke herself was part of the first cohort of leaders to go through the Alliance’s Wentworth Leadership Program, where she learned critical management skills about board governance and ethical, responsible land transaction processes. During ACE, NCLC grew from five to 12 staffers and went from being responsible for 1,500 acres of protected land to 10,000 acres. In addition to foundational capacity building support, NCLC received support for the $11.8 million outreach campaign to protect the Rainforest Reserve.

ACE has enabled Oregon land trusts to become sophisticated, empowered organizations within a thriving conservation community. Working behind the scenes to make it possible—putting in the proverbial blood, sweat and tears—have been Alliance staff members in the West, including Brad Paymar, Catherine Waterston, Owen Wozniak and former Western Division Director Wendy Ninteman, as well as many others at the Alliance and in the land trust community who saw ACE as a unique opportunity to transform conservation in Oregon.

“The land trust community in Oregon is incredibly strong thanks to the ACE program,” writes Katie Ryan, executive director of The Wetlands Conservancy, in a post-program survey. “The support of ACE really allowed the land trust community in Oregon to become a powerful conservation and community organizing force.”

The catalyst behind ACE was visionary philanthropist and Oregonian John Gray. Gray loved his home state and wanted to help preserve the native habitats, working lands and scenic beauty that meant so much to him and his family. While he could have donated money to protect a single property, instead he walked and talked with conservation leaders like Glenn Lamb, then-executive director of the Columbia Land Trust, and researched what could be done to strategically increase conservation throughout the entire state. Gray was a major proponent of Oregon’s strong land use laws—adopted in the 1970s to balance economic and environmental goals by preserving forests, farms and open space outside of urban areas—but was attracted to the permanence of land trust work.

Lamb shared the 2009 Land Trust Alliance Next Generation Report, which showed that growing the capacity and effectiveness of land trusts would have the greatest conservation impact. To a successful businessman like Gray, this leverage made sense. In 2012, Gray’s Yarg Foundation initiated a decade-long $10 million project with the Alliance to support Oregon land trusts, and the Oregon Advancing Conservation Excellence program was born.

The Alliance was ready for the moment. With the gift of Yarg Foundation funding, the Alliance saw an opportunity to put in action something it had long envisioned: a highly functioning and fully equipped community of land trusts that would carry the torch even after the funding ended. Much more than a grant program, ACE took a holistic approach to deliver an array of Alliance services, from leadership development to coaching and advisement to strategic planning, with the goal of achieving transformative conservation that would last.

The program started with a needs assessment for each of the participating land trusts. The groups were then asked to develop multi-year action plans identifying important activities that would help them become more effective. For example, land trusts could target investing in organizational systems, adding new staff, opening an office, preparing for accreditation or strategic planning work. With carefully delineated priorities and an action plan in place, the land trusts were then eligible to apply for competitive ACE grants from the Alliance to implement their goals and get support for a range of needs and opportunities as identified through those assessments.

“Capacity building is a long-term proposition,” says Brad Paymar, Western division director of Alliance field programs. “The Alliance worked in partnership with the land trusts to really understand needs, both funding and otherwise, for each organization.”

This included assessing the state’s land trust community as a whole to understand where support was needed and how to fill gaps. With the backing of ACE and Paymar, groups like Blue Mountain Land Trust and McKenzie River Trust expanded their service areas. ACE also helped support the development of new land trusts such as the Oregon Desert Land Trust, which has conserved 20,000 acres of wild and working lands in the state’s high desert region since forming in 2017.

The multi-year capacity-building grants of the first phase of the ACE program evolved into a second phase in which land trusts began to think more about community-centered conservation, diversity, equity, inclusion, advocacy and climate change.

“This approach allowed us to establish a foundation with each organization, and then build on that scaffolding,” says Paymar. “The program was highly adaptive. We shifted as the community became more sophisticated to increasing our support for elements like community-centered conservation and advocacy.”

While capacity-building grants helped land trusts accomplish the basics of running a successful organization—which included everything from having effective fundraising and stewardship databases to developing strategic plans to safeguard endangered places—catalyst grants supported new programs and encouraged land trusts to work together in more innovative ways, such as Columbia Land Trust’s investment in a diversity, equity and inclusion effort “that fundamentally changed the organization,” says Lamb.

For Greenbelt Land Trust’s executive director Jessica McDonald, it’s hard to fully explain the impact that ACE support has had on the organization’s growth and success over the last decade. GLT creates conservation corridors with trails and natural open spaces that connect the communities it serves in a fourcounty area throughout the mid-Willamette Valley. Today it is realizing partnerships that were only just beginning 10 years ago. “Enabling GLT to ‘staff up’ when we needed support the most has allowed us to recruit highly talented staff who have in turn been successful in securing larger project and capacity grants, expanding g donor engagement and private fundraising, and accelerating the pace of our conservation efforts,” says McDonald.

In fact, GLT’s financial foundation has become much more solid over the last decade with more unrestricted funds that allow the organization to “confidently increase staffing as needed, be more nimble with critical land acquisition opportunities and enable staff to work on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives,” notes McDonald. “This also includes our stewardship funds, which have grown beyond $4 million in that decade, strengthening our commitment to the perpetual management of protected lands.”

That’s the real impact of ACE, observes the Alliance’s Catherine Waterston, Western division project manager.

“Through ACE, these local organizations are now in a much stronger position—they have money in the bank and more staff to help take care of their conserved properties. They are poised to be land trusts for a long time,” says Waterston.

Through the 10-year investment from the Gray family, land trusts in Oregon are now in a much stronger position than ever and are poised to continue on that trajectory. The program’s influx of money, time and expertise has created a positive feedback loop: Capacity investments allowed land trusts to staff up, gain professionalism, expand reach, show more success, recruit more donors, protect more land and so on. Oregon land trusts have undergone a seismic shift in approach and impact, from opportunistically responding to small projects to strategically focusing on large, landscape-scale conservation work and meaningful projects that benefit communities, wildlife and natural resources. These outcomes are inspiring new funders to build on the Gray family’s legacy.

“ACE helped drive innovative conservation in Oregon, and its success can serve as a proof point for the land trust movement nationally,” says Paymar, who is helping adapt the ACE program as a model for other regions of the country. In 2020, the Alliance expanded ACE to include Washington and Idaho, and is now looking at similar efforts in other states.

Land Trust Alliance President and CEO Andrew Bowman agrees, noting that ACE builds on the Alliance’s long track record of catalyzing private land conservation by ensuring land trusts have the necessary vision, tools, capacity and resources to save and secure land now and for future generations.

“The Oregon ACE program offered an opportunity to demonstrate the impact of our work in a dramatic and concentrated way,” says Bowman. “If the land trust community is going to meet its goal of protecting another 60 million acres by the end of this decade, we need strong land trusts achieving tangible outcomes in communities.”