Minutes from July 9Th Wood River Land Trust Board Strategic Planning Retreat

Minutes from July 9th Wood River Land Trust Board Strategic Planning Retreat

3 concepts – Identity, Intention and Impact

Process has three parts:

Direction – identify, intention, impact
Implementation this is a function of the operations budget. If this is what we want to accomplish then how are we going to get there.
Evaluation – Is this the right thing to be doing and are we doing it correctly.

Product – We need to identify needs and our vision. We have identified part of our vision but it is too large for us to accomplish. Beneath vision is:

Mission
Goals
Strategies
Activities
Budget

The board identifies our mission and goals. The staff develops the strategies, activities and budget to accomplish the mission and goals. Most important question is what we don’t do. If we take on too much we lose our integrity.

Background Report from interviews with staff, board and 5 outside donors.

Four words came out of the surveys: Intention, Proactive, Relevance, and Capacity

Intention – needs to be more specific
Proactive – Is long term and more patient, more costly approach but is the most effective. Does not mean that we are to be less flexible. Taking advantage of opportunities needs to be balanced with being proactive.
Relevance – We need to be relevant to the needs of the community beyond the hiking, fishing, and hunting crowds. Our work is relevant but our message is not effective or worded correctly. We need to be embraced by the community. When our work and message is relevant the community will embrace us.
Capacity – We have the capacity but is our capacity equal to our vision – eyes bigger than our stomach. We do not want our vision to be ahead of our capacity/funds.

What is missing from the survey comments?

Rebecca – Question of our geographic scope and our vision. We have had opportunities in the past outside of Wood River Valley and there are still opportunities. Do we want to double down?
David Anderson – Over 80% of Blaine County is already open to public access. For some land trusts in more urban areas public access is very important but less so here.
Marc gave two examples of what some land trusts are doing that address what the community values that was not being provided. Feather River Land Trust conducted a conservation project adjacent to every school in their area. Deschutes Land Trust is protecting salmon habitat in anticipation of dams being removed and fish being able to migrate to streams that they cannot currently access.
Jack – Staff capacity should be addressed as this will determine our initiatives. We need to align our capacity with our vision.
Wolf – Did not see anything missing from the report. He said we need to improve our messaging but first we have to define our relevance to the community.
Rick – Should we be more focused or less focused on current projects. Cost and benefits. Marc then stated we deal with public policies and water. Opportunity costs and if we did not do a project could we be doing something else. Ed then stated if we do that what do we do. If we do something like water where is it going to take us and is it going to mushroom out of control. Megan stated that she thinks that we should take a stance on water issues and policies or we will lose our relevance. Megan said that we should at least be a part of the discussions and she also felt that we could bring in some big donors to support our water programs.

Messaging & Relevance

Kathie stated that we need to define our relevance and how we communicate it to the community.
Marc said that each board member needs to come up with a personal story about why he/she became involved in the Land Trust and how this story relates to our mission.
Wendy stated that words really matter and we need to think about the words that we use in our communications. She gave examples from a survey that found that people surveyed actually thought a watershed was a shed. People do not understand what a wildlife corridor is. We need to think about the relevance.
Marc said that respondents said that they did not know what an easement was and then responded that they did not like easements. Water is always #1 – people want clean and abundant water.
David stated that the majority of land out west is public. Historically the homesteaders chose the private lands that were the best and they also have the best water rights. So these private lands are lands that need to be protected. The public lands are the worse and are the leftovers from the homesteaders.
Megan – Should we be involved in fire mitigation and would this be seen as positive or negative.
Trent – What is important to me is the question of advocacy and public policy. We can be involved in decisions made on public planning and policies. What is our balance between advocacy, easements, etc?
Marc – There is upstream advocacy and downstream advocacy. Downstream involves more advocacy and is more controversial. What we can do is control what is done on our own properties and then establish examples that we can show to the community.
Keri – We should not be fearful of controversy as long as it is relevant to who we are. We can participate and not be controversial.
Richard – We need to determine who we want to be relevant to
Marc – Health benefits are always important to families – especially parents with kids. Clean water is an important health issue.
David – Draper Preserve brings us a healthy environment and connects us to the community and makes us relevant.
Richard – North Valley needs to understand what we are doing.
David - Does public feel any relevance to easements? The land owner gets a tax deduction. We just discussed the easement by Arco. The community will not have any connections to this easement.
Rebecca – TNC Idaho has support for broad scale land protection. We need to define who our community is. There is a donor community to support easements and farmland.
Scott – When we started our mission it stated that we would only accept easements in Blaine County and we can now count on one hand the number of easements that we hold in Blaine County. This is why we broadened our service area.
Kathy – Easements and land protection outside of Blaine County will eventually benefit all.
David – We need to be relevant to the community because our work is a State Statute that can be eliminated at any time.
Wendy on the community conservation initiative – WRLT from its beginning has been focused on the community. Other Land Trusts strive to be like WRLT as we are among the top tier of Land Trusts. The reason that we are focusing again on community conservation is due to comments made 7 years ago. It was stated that Land Trust conservation has failed. We said we worked with willing landowners which means nothing.

Relevancy – What do we need to stop; start and do we need to change what we are doing? How does it relate to community relevancy?

Rick – Highly beneficial projects that are beneficial and highly visible like the Bow Bridge and Boardwalk.
David – We need to focus on highly iconic properties that are highly visible like the Eccles properties where we can protect scenic views and also working land. What is most successful are iconic lands?
Keri – Rock Creek is iconic. How can we start to build off of that opportunity and bring people out to the RC property?
Kathie – Have small groups come out for activities on our properties. Kids too. This will help with donations.
Wolf – We need to start being proactive. In the past we have only been reactive. We need to identify projects that are relevant like the Red Barn between Ketchum and Sun Valley.
Richard – North of Hailey and Mid-valley areas are something for us to focus on for projects. For East Fork Donation we did not receive credit from the public.
Scott – Gave the Democrat project as an example of how we stretched funding with Swiftshire and the Animal Shelter. Developing projects like this with broader relevance by working with multiple organizations is a way to become more community relevant. We need to take risks like Democrat.
John F – stated that TNC gave up throwing dollars into dirt 20 years ago. We want to manage the land and not own it.
This evolved into an open conversation about owning land.
Wendy gave an example of the Greenbelt Land trust in Oregon who purchased an iconic working farm and ranch that provides local organic beef. Purchasing the farm made them a part of the community and provided food to the community creating an everlasting bond.
Marc summarized the land ownership discussion. We need to own a few properties to have our management control and to have relevance. To purchase land it needs to have relevance if we are going to hold on to it. What we want is to be able to eventually get our money back out of the property so we can use these funds again for another conservation project. Ideally we need to know in advance before buying property that we are going to get out money back out of it.
Keri – We need to figure out how to measure how we are successful. We felt a couple of years ago that we were not being successful because we were not receiving any easements. How are we going to measure our success if we are not buying properties or receiving easements? She does not like people thinking an easement is simply an economic benefit to the donor. She said this bothers her and she needs to work on the message and the relevance and importance of easements to the community.
Dan – We need signs on our properties.
Daphne – Relevance is ongoing and the O&D committee and board are inventing our marketing and development policies.
Marc – We need to develop relevance on relevant land to create relevance to the community.
Rebecca – We need to set our priorities. We are opportunistic now and need to be proactive and look at where to focus inside and/or outside of the valley. She felt we should focus on some areas outside of the WR Valley. Feels the Pioneers are a good area for us to focus. The 5 watersheds are too large of an area for us to be proactive.
Trent felt we should focus on the Pioneers too. We need to clarify what needs to be in our core area. The board needs to choose our core area and what our priority is.
Marc – Priority properties may not be due to the property’s conservation values but may need to be protected due to its visibility, open space, scenic values and community impact. What is often more important are the people connected to the property and not its conservation values. We need to identify priority areas and be proactive within our core area and then identify properties in the core area to protect with outlying service areas. We need to refine our conservation plan, where our proactive conservation area should be and then how staff will allocate time to do it.
John – The Pioneers need to be a priority to be protected as they are important and there is a lot of money from donors in the area.
Keri – How do we talk about our work in the Pioneers as we do not hold the easements but we did a lot of the work to protect the thousands of acres?
Jack – Likes the idea of some advocacy and education but questions if we have the capacity. What would our role be in advocacy and education needs to be determined and then our capacity?
Richard – Ask community what they think is relevant through questionnaire or focus groups.
Wolf – Start a campaign of urgency and concern about development coming back again. Start a campaign of urgency and head it ourselves.
Marc – It’s hard to get a community to understand a threat. One way would be to get some architects to render drawings of what future landscapes and the community will look like with planned development.
Ed – We need to relay the information that government policies can change at any time. E.g. hillside ordinances
Trent – How do we balance the need for our work with urgency?

How do we measure success in conservation work?

Community recognition and community awareness of what we are doing and positively completed. How to quantify this? Through new donors? Dollars raised? Through research of perception in the community conducted every three years?
Kathie – Raising dollars is not a good measure. Maybe community perception as a measure.
Wolf – dollars raised is the best measure of success
Marc – One aspect is new donors or donors who gave a second time in a year due to a project. Out of the conservation plan and property protected we can quantify how many core properties are protected. Longevity and sustainability of the organization.
Rebecca – Conservation diversity protected
Keri – Often we have work plans and goals but not really anything objectively with our easements. Home Rivers initiative set goals.
Marc – Take our operation costs and how we leverage dollars to develop a leverage ratio to encourage donors to invest in operations as without the staff we would not have been able to leverage the dollars.
Daphne – Donors like to hear what has been protected, restored, rivers reunited, etc.
Megan – Number of traditional and nontraditional partners working with us on projects.
Wendy – The alliance is working on a process of conservation measurement that she will share with us.

From morning discussion what did we decide and direction given to staff?

David – Better way to keep board informed of what they are doing so they can relay this message to donors.
Ed - Keep Keri’s ranking of properties and maybe prioritize drainages. Need to get board of directors meetings beyond making decisions.
Marc/Ed – Take half of the board meeting and make it dedicated to one topic. Make the other half be status quo. Board meetings have three parts: information, input and action. Get the staff reports sent out ahead of time and read prior to the meetings. Then we only vote on the staff reports and do not have to spend time on the report. Conservation is sex and the rest is raising the child.
Board members will become more active if we split the meeting up 50/50 as suggested.
John – We need to each come up with our elevator speech and our own personal antidote.

Role of advocacy and education. What are the advocacy and education roles that we should start, stop and continue?

Education

Currently we have the Student Conservation Council, Trout Friendly Lawns and water conservation as educational projects.
Ed/Jack/Marc/David – We don’t have staff time and education should not be a priority. It takes a long-term commitment for education and we would need to figure out the ROI for education. We do not have the staff or funds for a fulltime education staff member.
Marc – Education has three parts: Building awareness, understanding and changing opinion. We do educational programs only if we collaborate with partners for our educational issues. Outsource when possible to other organizations.
Marc –What other Land Trusts do. They do educational projects only if they directly support fundraising or our conservation efforts. Make fee simple properties open to educational classes. What is the importance of land? Soul of the land is fundamental to our community.
Scott – We need to educate the public on the financial and health benefits of our work. Directly communicate the value of conservation to the community in terms of water and land efforts.
Keri – We need a water component in our plan in order to be relevant to the community.
Marc – Water needs to be separated from Land Protection because outcomes (goals and measurement) of success for water are different than for Land Management. Breaking water out provides more clarity to our mission.

Advocacy

Jack/Rick –We need to be selective and careful in this small community.
Rebecca – What policies will make the most sense for us and we should participate as experts and professional advisors.
Marc – I suggest downstream advocacy for us to only participate in advocacy that will influence our properties. Upstream is broader and downstream is less narrow.
David – We should advocate to get cities to put in hillside ordinances.
Marc – The Executive Committee should present to the board advocacy issues that we may or may not address for board approval. E.g. Eccles, Sun Valley Company
This allows the staff freedom to react to issues without having to wait for a board meeting to get approval which may be too late. We will not advocate for anything that does not support our mission.
Rebecca – Likes this outline and wants to add a 5 year view of how this would turn out for the long-term threat.

Collaboration and what do we need to do to raise our profile?

Collaboration takes away from our visibility and credit for the work that we do.
We should develop specific agreements/MOU and we should always give credit to our partners in the press.