Training and teamwork in the northwest hills

by David Beers

Prior to the 1990’s, the word webinar was not in common use and neither were webinars themselves.  Since the onset of the Covid pandemic, though, it is quite common to spend several hours a day in Zoom meetings. While the option of webinars existed before the pandemic, their use has recently exploded.

There are webinar trainings that might not have happened pre-pandemic. One such offering is the Norfolk Land Trust (NLT) boot camp that some NLT board members are now attending. This is a weekly series of five one-hour Zoom sessions on how to run a land trust. Connie Manes of the Litchfield Hills Greenprint Collaborative is running the training, which is the first of its kind. While geared to train new land trust board members, veteran members are also attending. Between 20 and 30 participants have been at each training from over 13 conservation organizations, with four to six participants coming from NLT.

The first session is about what land trusts do and how they relate to the regional Greenprint Collaborative, the state-wide CT Land Conservation Council (CLCC) and the national Land Trust Alliance (LTA). Second is an introduction to land trust governance and the national Land Trust Standards and Practices that guide it. The third focuses on financial management, covering budgeting, insurance, typical land preservation costs, tax filings and annual audits. The fourth session is all about correctly conducting land transactions and the fifth session is to help guide good stewardship of land trust properties. The Land Trust Standards and Practices are the basis for the Land Trust Accreditation program. Thirty-nine land trusts in Connecticut, including NLT, have been accredited through this program. For NLT, this gives its donors confidence that they are donating to an organization that meets all the standards and practices required to be fiscally responsible, procedurally rigorous and ethically sound. 

The Litchfield Hills Greenprint Collaborative is a Regional Conservation Partnership, which serves as a source of information, advice and direct services for the land trusts and other land conservation organizations in the Litchfield Hills. In addition to all the towns in Litchfield County, the collaborative also covers the towns of Hartland, Burlington, Middlebury, New Milford and Sherman. The collaborative’s staff is underwritten by and work out of the offices of the Housatonic Valley Association in Cornwall. There are 34 dues-paying member land trusts and conservation organizations in the Greenprint Collaborative, which includes NLT. Members get assistance with finding and sharing paid staff, acquiring funding, mapping services, meetings, professional advice, training and LTA accreditation. 

The land trust boot camp is a new way for land trusts to keep board members up-to-date on what is required for a land trust to be a reliable means for land conservation. Manes is hopeful that the boot camp will become an annual event. Amy Blaymore Paterson of CLCC is enthusiastic about this new virtual program and would like to scale it up to all 137 land trusts in the state. Perhaps LTA will bring this idea to the national stage, a very exciting prospect in land conservation circles.