Mission

Sand County Foundation’s mission is to advance the use of ethical and scientifically sound land management practices and partnerships for the benefit of people and the ecological landscape.

Sand County Foundation's vision includes a future where there is widespread adoption of a land ethic based on private responsibility, meaningful incentives, and competent science resulting in improved land health and betterment for the people who live and work there.

At Sand County Foundation, we realize that reliance on regulation-driven environmental compliance will not provide protection of our ecological heritage. The traditional governmental approach has too often been punitive or onerous to the landholder—and has, too often, ignored the cultural, historical, and practical capital of the relationship between people and the places they hold dear.

Further, we believe there must be a broader understanding of private conservation that means more than acquiring land to create “preserves” or encumbering land in order to “protect” it. Prohibiting or constraining human uses of natural resources will not encourage long term, sustainable, innovative solutions to conservation challenges.

Sand County Foundation enlists the ingenuity and connection that people have with the lands and resources they hold to solve environmental issues. Our focus derives from Leopold’s land ethic— sound, voluntary environmentalism that depends on private ownership and stewardship. We focus our work on fostering, facilitating, and supporting private individuals and local communities to manage, benefit from, and strengthen tenure over lands and natural resources.

We are achieving this mission by:

• Providing financial, technical, and organizational support to private individuals and communities as primary agents of long-term landscape-scale conservation and management
• Rewarding responsible stewards and providing public recognition for outstanding private lands leadership to inspire others by their examples
• Serving as a conduit and catalyst for the exchange of monitoring and management practice information between and among private individuals, scientists, funders, and policy makers
  
• Removing regulatory barriers and creating meaningful incentives for landowners who enhance the environment for benefit to themselves and their community
• Creating on the land examples of environmental improvement suitable for replication
  

Sand County Foundation is a private non-profit organization dedicated to working with private landholders to improve natural habitats on their land.