Vision
Conservation at the landscape and ecosystem level will be most effective when local landholders are pro-actively involved in managing lands and resources according to their own cultural, economic, and ethical values. 

Mission
Community Based Conservation Network® promotes locally led natural resource conservation efforts in North America and Africa where landholders and communities have legitimate management authority and can improve their lives and environment through good stewardship.

• CBCN facilitates collaboration and learning among existing and emerging interest groups and local organizations that contribute legal, policy, cultural, economic development, and resource management expertise necessary for effective policy and project development.
• CBCN seeks to become a reliable information source about community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) for practitioners, potential donors, researchers, and policy makers.
• CBCN encourages the incorporation of resource monitoring and adaptive management into community conservation projects.
• CBCN makes direct investments in a limited set of CBNRM projects in Africa and North America to enrich practical understanding and professional credibility.

Strategy
The CBCN focuses on specific strategies to facilitate and document successful landholder conservation efforts.

• Assisting landholders undertake planning activities to define their objectives in terms of land and resource management and determine the strategies which will best ensure their achievement.
• Working locally and regionally to develop the organizations necessary for effective conservation at the local and landscape level. 
• Promoting policies that provide incentives for landholder resource stewardship.
• Building the capacity of landholders to manage forests, grasslands, savannas, water, and wildlife sustainably and where appropriate with neighboring rights holders.
• Developing and applying simple but effective techniques for monitoring natural resource conditions and the effects of management efforts according to landholder’s objectives.
• Bringing a diverse collection of landholders together at conferences and site visits so that they can exchange experiences regarding their efforts, successes and failures, and common issues faced.
• Analyzing and synthesizing the results of landholder conservation efforts and the data collected from monitoring work for publication in the scientific literature and other media. 

Links between Africa and North America
A core objective of Sand County Foundation’s work in Africa is to draw upon decades of African CBNRM experience to assist natural resource management policy-makers and practitioners in North America.  While there are significant differences between the African and North American contexts, there are, nevertheless, important learning opportunities to be found, including:

• Examples of African legislative decisions to devolve resource management from central government to landholder and village levels.
• Decades of experience in crafting effective institutions for managing resources at the local level.
• Empirical evidence of ecological improvement resulting from landholder stewardship.
• The potential for community decision making about resource use and conservation to give rise to or to strengthen local democratic institutions.
• Some of the most elegant and compelling displays of rural people manifesting Aldo Leopold’s land ethic.