Ontario Trillium Foundation has announced a grant of $300,800 to the Ontario Land Trust Alliance (OLTA).
And a Guelph area man was honoured for his strong vision for land trusts at the annual conference held in London in late October, co-hosted by Ontario Land Trust Alliance and Carolinian Canada Coalition.
Ontario Trillium Foundation volunteer board member, Donna Passmore announced the grant to support Ontario Land Trusts to implement best practices and meet standards of excellence in the highly technical field of land securement and stewardship. Over half of Ontario’s land trusts have no staff and rely exclusively on volunteers.
Fortunately many of those volunteers have a professional background that provides some of the needed expertise in land conservation.
The grant will support volunteer land trusts actions to meet legal requirements and regulations, recruit and train excellent board members, set priorities for organizational development, as well as efficiently and effectively secure land for conservation and protection in their communities.
The wide range of training needed to operate a land trust was covered in over 20 workshops, field trips, and sessions by experts in natural heritage inventory and mapping, fund-raising and fund management, real estate transactions and legal tools such as conservation agreements at the recent three day conference.
University of Guelph’s Professor Stew Hilts was also the first chairman of the OLTA and "wrote the book" on land trusts, Creative Conservation. Hilts lives near Guelph and is a professor at the University of Guelph, where he is also the director of the centre for land and water stewardship. Most recently, he has been working to save Ontario’s best places to grow food as chairman of Ontario Farmland Trust.
In recognition of the passion and dedication of the land trust movement, OLTA ‘s Community Engagement award recognized the achievements of Couchiching Conservancy. Highlights include:
– a series of community workshops involving quarry owners and ranchers;
– a partnership with the Orillia Packet and Times who print Couchiching’s full Newsletter four times a year; and
– a corporate membership program involving 80 local businesses
The land trust’s vision award is given to an individual or organization who has displayed extraordinary vision and exemplary leadership. The first recipient is ahead of the curve in identifying challenges and opportunities, and works hard to develop solutions.
