Strategic Plan
Cacapon & Lost Rivers Land Trust’s 2026-2035 Strategic Plan addresses the key conservation and organizational work needed to safeguard this treasure of a watershed. The Plan builds upon our foundational Healing Waters Plan, Landscape Prioritization Model, and 2020-2025 Strategic Plan.
Two Key Priorities
- Protect Land: Proactively grow a network of protected land hubs and corridors that conserve key conservation values throughout the watershed.
- Sustain the Trust: Ensure the strength and sustainability of the organization so we are equipped to confidently steward the lands in our care.
Strategies:
PRIORITY ONE: Protect Land
Strategy 1: Steward existing conservation easements. The Trust is committed to monitoring all properties in our care, maintaining good relationships with landowners, resolving challenges to our conservation easements and properties as quickly as possible, and assisting landowners with land management challenges where we can.
Strategy 2: Acquire new conservation easements on lands with high conservation values and/or that expand protected land hubs or corridors. The protection of connected priority resource lands is critical to achieving our vision. We will continue to build a network of natural lands, working forests, and agricultural lands to maintain the ecological function and resiliency, rural heritage, and economic vitality of the watershed.
Strategy 3: Prepare for the Trust’s eventual evolution. Over the next ten years, we intend to identify alternative programming (and the staffing and funding needed to do it) to continue the Trust’s mission in a new chapter when all land that can be protected has been protected.
PRIORITY TWO: Sustain the Trust
Strategy 1: Secure operating funds through fundraising campaigns.
Strategy 2: Secure operating funds through capacity grants.
Strategy 3: Promote the work of the Trust through effective outreach & communication activities.
Strategy 4: Convene the Cacapon Watershed Collaborative to foster community support, build capacity for the Trust and our partners, and attract resources to our watershed and its communities.
Strategy 5: Maintain administrative functions, ensuring fiscal health, accounting accuracy, and up-to-date policies and systems.
Strategy 6: Ensure sufficient human resources, including a competent, supported staff and a motivated Board of Directors reflective of the watershed’s people.
Join us as we nurture a sustainable legacy, preserving our region for generations to come.
Healthy Waters Prioritization Model
A Critical Cornerstone of the Strategic Plan
In 2003, the Cacapon & Lost Rivers Land Trust brought together more than 30 local, state, and federal stakeholders at a Healing Waters retreat to develop a conservation strategy for watershed protection.
A key outflow of the retreat was the decision to develop a science-based GIS model to identify tracks of land with high conservation values to protect through five spatial models: forests/uplands, agriculture, streams, wetlands, and rural heritage.
Data sets were classified into an 8 ordinal ranking based on a Jenks Natural Break Classification at the HUC12 and catchment levels.
The Cacapon Watershed GIS Prioritization Model, regularly updated according to current conditions and evidence, continues to guide strategic decisions for optimal land protection.