National Association of Conservation Districts

National Association of Conservation Districts

NACD's mission is to serve conservation districts by providing national leadership and a unified voice for natural resource conservation.

Leveraging Funds for Conservation Projects

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the verb, leverage, as "to supplement, to improve or enhance". To leverage funds for conservation projects is to enhance existing funds by finding other funding partners on a project-specific basis to accomplish a task that couldn’t be accomplished alone.

Fund raising for conservation is a constant necessity, but leveraging funds has advantages over seeking 100% of a project’s funds from others. Think about it from the funder’s perspective. A potential funding organization may be more willing to back your project when it knows that your money is also at risk. The organization that will primarily implement the project has more standing as an equal partner when it has some cash on the line as well as the in-kind service that it would put into a project.

Success Stories:

The Southeast Conservation Buffer Campaign (SCBC) was a public-private partnership established by American Farmland Trust with seed money from an EPA grant and additional funds from corporate partners that started in 1997 and ended in 2001. Its mission was to help NRCS promote the use of conservation buffers in the nine state Southeast region. Most of the projects that SCBC planned were publications addressing segments of the major target audience, farmers. Nearly every project had a total cost that exceeded SCBC’s budget. Some examples include:

South Dakota No-Till Drill Project

In the prairie pothole country region of South Dakota, U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) field staff wanted to encourage widespread planting of warm season grasses for wildlife and waterfowl but that required specialized grass-seeding drills. A statewide partnership set a goal of acquiring 30 drills to rent to landowners and to split the cost 50/50 between state funding partners and local funding partners. In five years, over 225,000 acres could be planted to warm season grasses.The state partnership of FWS, the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks and Ducks Unlimited provided half the money.

The local funding partnerships varied from one conservation district to another, but one good example of the local match was in Lake County. The Lake County Conservation District, the Izaak Walton League and Pro-Pheasants each put up $2,300 and the Lake Campbell Improvement Association provided $1,000. Added together from seven state and local sources, a drill costing nearly $16,000 was acquired. Now four years into the project, Lake County is right on target with 6,000 acres sown in warm season grasses. " The state and local partnership enabled purchases that none of the partners could have afforded alone." Said Carl Madsen, FWS Private Lands Coordinator.

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