Our Conservation Partners Shared and We’re Listening

It’s hard to believe that more than a year has passed since we held our conservation partner meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina in December 2018. With over 25 attendees, we learned a great deal about our partners, the challenges they face and took in their suggestions. As a result, we have adapted the Fund to respond to the ideas posed by the group.

First, the timing of the program cycle was moved up in order to help our partners secure funding that can be leveraged to help attract additional partners.   We moved the year five cycle to the fourth quarter of 2019. This will allow us the opportunity to select and announce awardees in early 2020. We are optimistic that this timeframe will provide more flexibility to our grantees. The 2020 RFP is already open and submissions are due by January 24, 2020  at 5:00 p.m. EST.

We also created an improved tracking system to help us assess the progress we are making towards our 35,000-acre goal of forest conservation over our ten-year program commitment.  You can read the detailed breakdown later in this newsletter, but we are well on our way to achieving this target!   To help us improve the tracking of these selected forest types you will see a new request on our 2020 cycle RFP.   We will be asking for acreage by forest type for our four forest categories as well as totals for general bottomland forests.

We heard and understand the need for more public relations engagement.  We have added more land trusts as well as contacts at forestry schools to our database to help with outreach efforts. We continue to work with our grantees to publicize when projects close, while maintaining the privacy of landowners, who are critical to our work together. We welcome the opportunity to join our partners as you share these wonderful landscapes with the public. We hope this inaugural newsletter and subsequent ones will also help at keeping you updated with the Fund’s progress. If you have suggestions related to outreach, please let us know. Thank you again for helping us to evolve the Fund and know that there are still additional areas of opportunity that we continue encouraging: diversity within the conservation fund, expansion into the Piedmont and other regions, and exploration of non-riparian wetland forest types as priority wetland forests.