Land Trust Alliance's Diversity Activities
The Land Trust Alliance held a “Diversity & Conservation: A New Model for the 21st Century” course in Spring 2007 and is hosting several sessions integrating issues of diversity and conservation at their upcoming annual conference in Fall 2007. The national conservation organization believes that the future of land conservation depends on land trusts reaching out to all Americans—non-white and white, urban and rural—to help convey the wonders of nature, build a love for the land, and pass on conservation values to the next generation.
While nearly all who work in land conservation are of northern European ancestry, this population represents only two-thirds of America now, and will represent less than half of America by 2060. Meanwhile, as the American population grows and its cities and suburbs spread, more American children are growing up separated from land and natural beauty. Today, 80 percent of Americans live in metropolitan areas, and their votes will increasingly determine this country’s priorities—including the extent of support for land conservation.
The Land Trust Alliance and its partners are undertaking an initiative that will provide land trusts with the training and resources they need to reach out to all members of their communities. The goal of the Land Conservation Diversity Initiative is to build a conservation community that looks like America .
The Initiative aims to help land trusts:
- Save more land, with broader community support, by engaging our diverse communities,
- Better understand the conservation needs of different constituencies, and
- Ensure that conservation reflects the needs of all constituencies.
The Land Trust Alliance is a national conservation organization that works to save the places people love by strengthening land conservation throughout America . We serve as a university for land conservation that trains the people who do the work to conserve your favorite farm, forest, park or trail. We strengthen community-based land trusts by providing nonprofit management consulting, innovative research, state of the art business practices, and support for accreditation services. The Land Trust Alliance is based in Washington, D.C., and has several regional offices. Please visit www.lta.org to learn more.
Contact:
Lisa Jacobson
1660 L Street, NW
Suite 1100
Washington, DC 20036
ljacobson@lta.org
The Nature Conservancy's Internship Program for City Youth
Click here for more information
The Internship Program reaches out to underserved, diverse communities of young people and recruits them as seasonal paid preserve staff to assist in stewardship activities throughout the Northeast U.S. In addition to paying the students a competitive hourly wage, The Nature Conservancy covers living and recreational expenses, which further ensures the participation of students from all socio-economic backgrounds. In addition to providing The Nature Conservancy with a committed and eager workforce, the Program exposes urban students to a variety of new experiences which foster the development of important life skills at a critical age in their development. They learn how to live independently outside of the city away from their friends and families. They participate in demanding hands-on conservation field work, work as a team, and are responsible for cooking their own meals, cleaning and doing their own laundry. The program also provides students with many first time recreational activities in nature, like swimming, camping, hiking, fishing and kayaking.
The Nature Conservancy's partnerships with diverse school systems ensures that the majority of participants are students of color and first generation immigrants that truly reflect the diversity of New York City. The student body of the High School for Environmental Studies is approximately 40% Latino, 20% African-American, 26% Caucasian and 14% Asian-American. The student body of The Brooklyn Academy of Science and the Environment is 99% African-American/Afro-Caribbean. Following the summer field season, the Nature Conservancy works closely with partners to ensure a continuity of support. Year round programs include alumni meetings, reunion work days, preserve visits, classroom presentations, and career counseling.
The model’s success is based on the combined efforts of students, mentors, and preserve staff from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds who join forces to live, work and learn together in a natural environment for an extended period of time. The participants meet each other for the first time as they prepare for the four week field season, and all of the students are separated from their families as they acquire critical life skills, gain independence and an understanding of multiculturalism and inclusion. As a result, students from an array of ethnic backgrounds must learn to work collaboratively towards a shared set of conservation goals they are expected to achieve. This multicultural and collective approach to environmental education uses the working and living environment to help students accept and value other cultures and their environmental experiences and traditions. It facilitates an understanding that all cultures have different relationships with the environment which they can share and draw upon for greater understanding and inspiration.
Contact:
Brigitte Griswold
Program Director, Youth Partnerships
The Nature Conservancy
322 Eighth Avenue, 16th Floor
New York, NY 10001
bgriswold@tnc.org
(212) 381-2186
Trust for Public Land's Tribal & Native Lands Program
http://www.tpl.org/tier3_cdl.cfm?content_item_id=1180&folder_id=217
For thousands of years the native peoples of North America lived in complex societies that preserved, protected, and sustained the land on and with which they lived. Native American’s of North America ceded nearly 2 billion acres of land to the United States of America between 1776 to 1880. By 1880 Tribal Nations reserved 155 million acres for their exclusive use as sovereigns. Between 1880 and 1930 Tribal nations along with Native Hawaiians were dispossessed of an additional 100 million acres by the federal government for non-Native use. By 1990 Native people lost another 10 million acres due to Federal Indian Policies to terminate or assimilate Tribal Nations. Today, Native nations retain 45 million acres or 2% of their land in either federal trust or by individual Indian allotments or individual Hawaiian leases.
The Trust for Public Land (TPL), a national non-profit land conservation organization, has a clear and concise mission; Land for People. TPL conserves land for people to enjoy as parks, community gardens, historic sites, rural lands, and other natural places, ensuring livable communities for generations to come. Since 1972, TPL has worked with willing landowners, community groups, and national, state, and local agencies to complete more than 3,000 land conservation projects in 46 states, protecting more than 2 million acres. Since 1994, TPL has helped states and communities craft and pass over 330 ballot measures, generating almost $25 billion in new conservation-related funding.
In 1997 TPL developed a Tribal & Native Lands Program (T&NLP) that works with Tribal & Native communities to help regain their lost lands. The T&NLP is the only program of its kind in the national conservation field. The T&NLP serves at the request of Native communities to restore their land base and correct the social injustices of years past. The T&NLP has helped to preserve, protect, and sustain over 200,000 acres of lands for Native communities. This program strives to ensure Native communities across the United States have an ally in the land conservation movement.
TPL has become a leader in the national conservation community by initiating an effort devoted to working with tribal/native governments to acquire and protect their ancient homelands.
TPL's Tribal & Native Lands Program was created to expand partnerships with tribes to assist them in reversing a history of dispossession. Tribes are proven leaders as natural resource stewards and restoring traditional lands to tribal ownership--or under public ownership where tribal values are afforded legal protection-assists native communities in meeting their land conservation, natural resource restoration and cultural heritage objectives. Clearly, TPL's mission and the needs of land-based tribal communities are closely aligned.
The Tribal & Native Lands Program provides several services to:
- Preserve culturally significant places that protect tribes’ histories and heritage.
- Conserve natural lands that protect wildlife habitat and safeguard clean air and water.
- Promote health by counteracting high rates of diabetes, cancer, and kidney and cardiovascular disease with traditional land-based diets and lifestyles.
- Promote diverse economies based on traditional art, cooperative agriculture and ranching, and culturally appropriate tourism, addressing long-standing problems of unemployment and low income.
TPL’s work with Native and Tribal peoples will build stronger communities that will move beyond survival and into prosperity and sustainability for years to come.
Contact:
Charles F. Sams III
Director
Tribal & Native Lands Program
Trust for Public Land
806 SW Broadway, Suite 300
Portland, Oregon 97205
(971) 244-4107
Chuck.Sams@tpl.org
Boston Environmental Diversity Collaborative
http://www.elpnet.org/bostoncollaborative.html
The Boston Environmental Diversity Collaborative was a two-year initiative that provided training, consultation, opportunities for dialogue, and peer mentoring among Boston-based environmental groups that wanted to substantively integrate diversity into their operations to increase organizational impact and effectiveness. In addition to each organization's internal efforts, participating groups had the opportunity to learn from one another with the goal of building leadership for diversity within the Boston environmental community.
Through the Diversity Collaborative, participating organizations tapped into nearly $100,000 of in-kind diversity consultation and support and joined a dynamic community of leaders and organizations seeking to make the Boston region a hub for diversity within the environmental movement.
In December 2003, the Environmental Leadership Program (ELP) received a two-year grant to facilitate the project, following up on a successful 2003 pilot project. The Diversity Collaborative was officially launched in summer 2004.
Goals and Objectives
The Boston Environmental Diversity Collaborative will:
- build diversity leadership and skills among the staff and boards of Boston-based environmental organizations to enable them to complete a range of diversity initiatives successfully.
- facilitate collaboration and cross-organizational learning among Boston-based organizations to help them tackle the complex and challenging issues of diversity facing the environmental field.
- build a cadre of experienced, confident leaders in the Boston environmental community who can act as change agents within their institutions on diversity issues, provide crucial peer support, and mentor others in the environmental field.
- prepare environmental organizations to take advantage of opportunities, including Third Sector New England's Diversity Initiative grants, to accomplish specific institutional changes within their institutions
- create a model for how to address diversity issues through a regional collaborative effort, for potential replication in other communities and regions within the environmental community.
- connect environmental organizations in the Boston area to other diversity efforts within the environmental movement and in other fields and create public information that can be shared to spur progress and ensure that initiatives add value.
Contact:
Environmental Leadership Program
1609 Connecticut Ave. NW
#400
Washington, DC 20009
(202) 332-3320
Building Capacity Through Diversity Project
The Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS) in Michigan led the Building Capacity Through Diversity Project, made possible by the support of the Mott Foundation. In partnership with various environmental organizations, this project sought to foster a more diverse and inclusive grassroots movement around health, housing, land use, and environmental justice. Participants engaged in a series of anti-racist, anti-oppression trainings (over a 10-month period) to examine the barriers that exist among our communities and in our work. Participants from across communities, cultures, disciplines, and realms of activism, explored the personal and organizational impacts of race, culture and the environment. Trainings were open to any community leader or organization in Michigan working on issues of environment, housing, health, land use, transportation, community revitalization, and other related issues.
Contact:
Kathryn Savoie, PhD
Environmental Program Director
Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS)
6450 Maple Street
Dearborn, MI 48126
(313) 216-2225
ksavoie@accesscommunity.org