A nearly $9 million bequest to MaineCF from an anonymous donor will triple the size of MaineCF grantmaking for conservation beginning next year.
The Roger N. Heald Fund, half dedicated to conservation and half for food insecurity, will help support a broad range of projects and allow MaineCF for the first time to award grants for land acquisitions and easements. A new conservation grant program drawing on Heald Fund resources and other funds will award its first grants in 2020.
A report commissioned by MaineCF will help guide development of the new program, which provides an opportunity to use current research and data to have an impact on Maine’s landscape. Maine’s wealth of 84 nonprofit land trusts own or hold easements on more than 2.6 million acres that protect fields, forests, trails, farms, parks, wilderness, waterfront, fisheries, and wildlife habitat.
Over the past 30 years, at least $600 million has gone to acquisition of lands and conservation easements in Maine, with more than half of the funding from individuals, foundations, and businesses. However, in recent years fewer and smaller foundation grants have been awarded for land acquisition, according to the Maine Conservation Task Force, convened in 2018 by Maine Coast Heritage Trust, The Nature Conservancy, and other partners.
Why does this matter? Among the task force findings:
• Increased access to places with physical activity combined with information outreach produced a 48.4 percent increase in the frequency of physical activity by students
• Maine’s 17.7 million acres of forest provide the potential to partially mitigate adverse effects of a changing climate
• The state’s $8.2 billion outdoor recreation economy supports 76,000 jobs.
Collaboration will be key to land conservation, according to the MaineCF report by Jessica Burton of the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. It’s essential, she adds, to recognize that current land efforts follow thousands of years of land stewardship by the Wabanaki people. She notes more examples are emerging of partnerships between land conservation organizations and Maine’s Tribal Nations.
MaineCF has supported conservation organizations during its 36-year history through the Fund for Maine Land Conservation, the Community Building Grant Program, and many conservation-minded donors. In the first six months of this year, the foundation awarded 222 grants related to the environment that totaled more than $3.2 million.
Conservation strategies that address climate change and climate resilience, likely priorities for the new conservation grant program, will bolster MaineCF’s existing efforts, including an energy efficiency focus added last year to the Belvedere Historic Preservation and Energy Efficiency Grant Program. By the end of 2020, Belvedere will have awarded more than $300,000 to nonprofit organizations to improve the energy efficiency of buildings they steward.
To find out more about the new conservation program and MaineCF’s work on energy efficiency, please visit the Climate Change Initiative page at www.mainecf.org.
Woodward Point Preserve in Brunswick, one of the last undeveloped coastal parcels of its size in southern Maine, opened to the public this fall in a partnership with Maine Coast Heritage Trust and Brunswick- Topsham Land Trust. The Brunswick land trust has received grant support from MaineCF’s Fund for Maine Land Conservation. Photo Yoon S. Byun
