From the executive director
Pay it Forward
Photo by Laurie Wachter.
In the land conservation world, you have to have good partners because land is expensive — especially here — and the world is an unpredictable place. Things happen, as we’ve all painfully learned, that can’t be anticipated. Knowing that we can rely on our partners, like Ag + Open Space and Regional Parks, among others, when things go awry, we’re ready to roll up our sleeves when they need us in turn. That was the case with the massive Gloeckner-Turner project. Similar to our Jenner Headlands project, which would have collapsed due to the 2009 state bond freeze had it not been for our partners, we were pleased to help when Ag + Open Space asked us to close a funding gap for its Gloeckner-Turner Ranch conservation easement.
Several individuals were part of this deal as the funding that Sonoma Land Trust provided came from individual donors and was matched by the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation. This project is a prime example of how your support is leveraged with other sources of public and private funding to help big projects come to fruition.
Along with Gloeckner-Turner (click here to learn more and contribute to sustaining our work) and the earlier Cooper Creek acquisition, we plan to protect four more exciting properties by next spring — an all-time record! You’ll read about them soon in the spring newsletter, which will be coming to you virtually for the first time in early June. We hope you’ll enjoy the convenience of the online newsletter being interactive so you can click directly to web pages and videos mentioned in its stories. Please let us know what you think.
Lastly, our digital programming continues next week with a free presentation on Wednesday, June 3 at 1pm by Ken-ichi Ueda, co-director of iNaturalist.org. Ken-ichi will talk about iNaturalist’s citizen science tools and how sharing observations of local nature with communities and biologists around the world helps them (and the rest of us) understand how everything in nature is interconnected. We hope you’ll tune in.