News

On October 1, land trust leaders from across the Greater New Haven region gathered at the Regional Water Authority’s Lake Whitney Water Treatment Plant for an evening of connection, candid conversation, and exploration of opportunities to work more closely together.

The gathering was part of CLCC’s ongoing effort to create spaces where neighboring land trusts can step away from the immediate demands of their organizations, connect with peers, and think collectively about the opportunities and challenges facing conservation in their region.

That kind of connection matters. Many Connecticut land trusts are powered largely or entirely by volunteers who are balancing board service, stewardship, fundraising, community engagement, and conservation projects. It can be easy to feel like the challenges facing an organization are theirs alone to solve.

As one participant reflected during the evening, it was reassuring simply to hear that her land trust was not the only one wrestling with many of these issues.

Peer gatherings create opportunities to learn from one another, but they also provide something equally important: the comfort of realizing that others are asking many of the same questions.

Over dinner, participants talked about shared challenges including board recruitment and leadership succession, fundraising, community engagement, growing stewardship responsibilities, and how to become more proactive in identifying future conservation opportunities.

The conversation also surfaced a potentially exciting example of regional collaboration: a conservation opportunity near the borders of Cheshire, Hamden, North Haven, and Wallingford. What began as a broader discussion quickly became a tangible reminder that conservation opportunities—and the natural systems we are working to protect—do not stop at municipal boundaries.

Our setting for the evening reinforced that point.

Before dinner, Regional Water Authority staff gave participants a behind-the-scenes tour of the Lake Whitney Water Treatment Plant. We are grateful to RWA for hosting us and sharing their expertise.

Beyond being a fascinating look at how drinking water is treated, the tour provided an important backdrop for thinking about landscape-scale conservation. Protecting forests, wetlands, streams, and other lands throughout a watershed is essential to protecting water quality, and watersheds rarely align neatly with municipal boundaries. Their protection depends on coordination among communities, land trusts, water utilities, agencies, landowners, and other partners.

In many ways, Lake Whitney was the perfect setting for a conversation about regional conservation.

CLCC does not expect a single gathering to solve the challenges facing local land trusts. What these gatherings can do is create space for relationships to form, ideas to surface, and organizations to recognize where they might accomplish more together than they could independently.

They also give CLCC an opportunity to listen.

The themes raised during the evening will help inform how we support land trusts in Greater New Haven and across the state, from board development and fundraising to conservation planning, stewardship, community engagement, and regional collaboration.

We are grateful to everyone who joined us and shared their experiences, ideas, and questions—and again to the Regional Water Authority for welcoming us to Lake Whitney.

The conversations begun that evening are ones we look forward to continuing.