What Would Have to Be True?

Sarah Newkirk became executive director of the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County in the middle of a capital campaign. It was her first time leading a full organization, not just a conservation team.

Five years later, she has closed a $15 million farmland deal, opened a wildlife crossing that Caltrans is now replicating statewide, and taken flood-prone farmland out of production instead of walling nature off from the rising sea.

The Land Trust treats wildlife corridors, working farms, wetlands, and coastline as one overlapping mission instead of three separate fights, and that range is the model now.

None of it happened because a plan showed up fully formed. Newkirk's method was to stop asking why something couldn't get done and start asking what would have to be true for it to succeed.

Measure Q, the county fund now generating seven million dollars a year for climate resilience, exists because she ran that exact exercise with her board on a measure that had already failed twice.

The throughline across five years of land deals, a rebrand, and a ballot measure is relationships: the currency that actually buys land, wins ballot measures, and keeps stewardship funded for the long haul.

The return on all of it is joy: a staff that loves the work, a public that shows up for it, and a cycle where good conservation earns the kind of community support that funds the next project.

Episode Highlights:

[00:01:30] Coming in as the new ED mid-capital-campaign, the same week Jonathan started at the Seymour Center

[00:03:00] Learning fundraising by leaning on friendship, not a fundraising department

[00:04:30] The unwritten rule that new EDs get a three-year window, then an expiration date

[00:05:30] Turning the honeymoon period into a five-year strategic plan built around coastal climate adaptation

[00:06:30] Beach Ranch: taking flood-prone farmland out of production to let marshland move inland

[00:07:30] Retiring 47-year-old branding and finally owning the "conservation incubator" identity

[00:09:30] Inside the Highway 17 wildlife crossing, now a model Caltrans is replicating statewide

[00:12:00] Why the land trust model runs on one tool: real estate

[00:16:00] The Land Trust's three beneficiaries: wildlife, working agriculture, and people, together

[00:26:00] The "what would have to be true" method that turned a twice-failed ballot measure into Measure Q

[00:31:00] Relationships as business model: the Estrada ranch deal and the win-win test

[00:37:30] What disappears without public buy-in: money, momentum, and joy
 

Notable Quotes:

[00:02:35]: "You can't even begin to understand the range of things that an executive director of a nonprofit does until you become an executive director of a nonprofit." Sarah Newkirk 

[00:17:15]: "Our third beneficiary is people. Public access is expressly built into our mission." Sarah Newkirk 

[00:24:30]: "Not 'we need to do this or else,' but 'here's what this could look like if we did it this way.'" Eric Ressler

[00:28:00]: "We made a list of what had to be true, and we made those things true." Sarah Newkirk 

[00:31:00]: "The foundational question is: can what I do as my business model serve you in some way?" Sarah Newkirk 

[00:39:15]: "When you provide this kind of conservation work, this kind of climate adaptation work, to the broader public, the public loves it, and therefore they love you. And that is, I think, a beautiful, virtuous cycle." Sarah Newkirk 

[00:39:30]: "I love that the answer is joy. I think we need a lot more joy in how this work happens." Eric Ressler 

Resources & Links:

• Land Trust of Santa Cruz County — Sarah's organization
• Highway 17 Wildlife Crossing — the crossing project discussed at length
• Beach Ranch wetland restoration — the sea level rise adaptation project
• Conservation Blueprint for Santa Cruz County — the 2012 planning document Sarah references
• Learning the Land podcast — the Land Trust's own show
• Watsonville Wetlands Watch — stewardship partner organization
• Resource Conservation District of Santa Cruz County — stewardship partner organization
• Central Coast Prescribed Burn Association — stewardship partner organization
• Measure Q — Santa Cruz County's 2024 water and wildfire resilience tax measure
• Proposition 4 — California's $10 billion 2024 climate bond

Full Transcript:

Eric Ressler [00:01:05]: Sarah Newkirk, welcome to Seymour Studios here.

Sarah Newkirk [00:01:10]: Thank you.

Eric Ressler [00:01:10]: So we are here for Designing Tomorrow, our show about social impact. And I'm really excited to dig in on all kinds of topics. A little bit of background for listeners who may not know you. You are the executive director of the Land Trust at Santa Cruz. And we worked together, full disclosure, on some branding work, and you came in as a new ED. I'd actually like to start there. I'd like to hear your story and your trajectory coming in, having deep expertise and knowledge around conservation and environmentalism, and you can speak to some of the other experiences that you've had. But you came in as a new ED to an organization that had rich history, had a lot of community, had a lot of community equity and ownership involved in it. Walk me through what that experience was like.

Sarah Newkirk [00:01:55]: Well, let's just say that I came in unprepared. I have a rich background in conservation, but conservation practice. I'm a leader of sorts in the sense of building teams to accomplish difficult work. But this was my first experience being a leader of a whole comprehensive organization, including the aspects of the organization that go far beyond conservation: the fundraising aspects, administration and operational aspects, things like fleet management. You can't even begin to understand the range of things that an executive director of a nonprofit does until you become an executive director of a nonprofit. And when I came in, which was in August of 2021, it was the exact same day that Jonathan became the ED of the Seymour Center.

Eric Ressler [00:02:50]: No way.

Sarah Newkirk [00:02:55]: Exact same day. We celebrate our anniversary every year.

Eric Ressler [00:02:55]: Amazing.

Sarah Newkirk [00:02:55]: And when I first came in, we were actually in the middle, believe it or not, of a capital campaign. My predecessor's departure came, to some extent, at the expense of that capital campaign, which was well underway. And as you know, capital campaigns are based on relationships, and for the Land Trust, deep and authentic relationships. There's no way to manufacture those. So the first thing I had to do was get my fundraising legs under me, and I leveraged my friendships to do that. I leveraged my friendship with Jonathan. He helped me write an appeal letter when I didn't find myself with the staff necessary to do it. So it was definitely a trial by fire coming into that leadership position. But I will say that I was supported by some exceptional staff and some exceptional board members. Yeah, I came in unprepared, but I feel very well prepared now. Five years out, I feel as though I have a pretty clear sense of what I'm doing. They always say that program staff get to be the new guy for about a year, but EDs get to be the new guy for about five years.

Eric Ressler [00:04:20]: I love that. I've actually joked with Jonathan before on the show that I feel like a new ED has roughly a three-year window to really put a stake in the ground and prove themselves, so to speak. That's a weird way of saying it. But I think when a new ED comes in, there's usually some expectation that there's going to be some change in the air. And I think there's this window of opportunity: if you don't make some of your biggest moves in those first three years, that's a somewhat arbitrary number, but I'm going to stick with it, you lose your ability to do so. Again, not a strict rule, but I'd be curious to hear, did you think about that coming in, that tension, that balance between wanting to respect what was there and the way things were done, but also knowing that you have your own vision, your own set of opinions, priorities, theory of change? How did you balance all of that?

Sarah Newkirk [00:05:10]: That is absolutely true. And I would add, maybe for later, that I also think EDs have an expiration date. There is a period of time in which you're going to be effective at making change, doing good conservation or whatever the issue is that the organization's built around. And then you probably lose your luster after a little while. I don't know what that period is for me, but I think you're absolutely right that you have a honeymoon period where you're this new shiny object that the board has recruited and they're really proud of, and they're willing to give you a really long lead. And yes, we took advantage of that, not in a bad way, but we stepped into the opportunity to make big changes, to do things like establish a new strategic plan. We're working toward the end of a five-year strategic plan that we kicked off in 2022 that brought in entirely new aspects of conservation work the Land Trust had never really done before, including coastal climate adaptation.

Our Beach Ranch project is really the first of its kind, a sea level rise adaptation project where we're taking marginal, flood-prone farmland out of production in order to accommodate the natural progression of marshland landward as the sea level rises. Doing that also protects farming in the community. That was new stuff. And when we first started talking about doing land deals, and when I say land deals, you have to understand that buying a 250-acre farm on the coast of Monterey Bay is a $15 million enterprise. So I'm not selling a small thing. It's a big thing that we're doing. That kind of long lead is absolutely essential. We built that strategy into our strategic plan, but not before we had started to socialize it internally.

Another thing is the branding work we did with you guys. The Land Trust had been represented by pretty much the same collateral since its inception, which was in 1978. It was lovely, but it was dated. We felt that the organization had really turned a corner and was ready to step out into the world as a newer, more modern enterprise doing really cutting-edge conservation. Part of the new perspective I brought to the Land Trust is owning what it already was, which was a conservation incubator. The Land Trust has been, for its entire almost 50-year life, doing really innovative conservation work, conservation work other land trusts don't do: building trails near farmland, having farmland next to wetlands, doing this wetland regression project like we're doing at Beach Ranch. And the wildlife crossing on Highway 17, really one of the first of its kind in the state of California. Now Caltrans is replicating that business model in other places to provide for wildlife connectivity around the state.

Eric Ressler [00:08:55]: Could you briefly, just for our listeners who might not be familiar with that project, give the two-minute elevator pitch of what that crossing actually is and why it matters?

Sarah Newkirk [00:09:00]: The wildlife crossing across Highway 17 was built in direct response to wildlife mortality at that exact location. We worked with scientists to find the place where wildlife were experiencing the greatest impact from colliding with vehicles, on the assumption that's also a place where people are experiencing the most impact from colliding with wildlife. So we had to buy land, or buy an interest in land, on both sides of the highway in order to even get Caltrans started on the process of figuring out how we were going to permit, construct, and operate the wildlife crossing. But since we have, there have been hundreds of crossings: deer, mountain lions, bobcats, and lots of gray foxes. Go to our website at landtrustsantacruz.org and look at the wildlife videos. I know the eagle cams are cool, but the fox videos of those guys transiting, they actually go under there and they play. There are deer that go under there and they take a nap. It's a fantastic amenity for our community, and an amenity our community contributed to. One of the tools we used to pay for the wildlife crossing was the first Measure D, a transportation bond measure for Santa Cruz County. That really helped spur the fundraising around the wildlife crossing.

Eric Ressler [00:10:40]: I'd like to hold on that a little bit and talk about how you guys think about different levers for creating change. Because working with you, and watching your org since working with you, one of the things that stuck with me is you say you're an incubator, an innovation incubator, I think is the term you used, right? And what I've noticed is you've used various methodologies for creating change, whether those are legal interventions or political interventions, like passing Measure D, which gave us a bunch of state funding, or was it state funding that came in as a match? Measure D was local funding. It was all local funding. That's right. So tell me, when you're thinking about enabling or enacting your strategic plan, how do you look at all those different tools, those different levers, and choose: these are the ones we're going to use, these are the ones we're best fit for. Walk me through your thought process in doing that.

Sarah Newkirk [00:11:35]: Well, the Land Trust model is fundamentally about one tool, and that is real estate. Back in the '40s and '50s, when there wasn't such a thing as a land trust, it was the Nature Conservancy that originated this idea: let's not do the controversial legal stuff, let's not sue anybody, let's not do advocacy. Let's do the thing that is going to be uncontroversial and that is going to protect the resource in the place it needs to be protected the most. And that is to purchase real estate. For years, TNC was receiving gifts of backyards in Connecticut, used to be the joke. The Land Trust of Santa Cruz County also had a similar period of time where what we were doing was basically taking donations. That was what we could afford: free real Estate.

Eric Ressler [00:12:30]: That's not a bad deal here.

Sarah Newkirk [00:12:30]: And we still own some of those donations, and we kind of wish we didn't own some of those, but that's what young organizations tend to have to do. As we've grown and our ability to raise money has increased, we've been able to prioritize real estate that would really serve the resource best. That's conservation planning. There's a whole group of scientists and practitioners who are specialists in this, but the Land Trust was one of the conveners of the group that wrote the Conservation Blueprint for Santa Cruz County. That was written in 2012. It's still the seminal document we all use for thinking about conservation. It doesn't contain everything, and when we have to do things like sea level rise adaptation that document didn't really consider, we have to do an additional plan, but it's still a foundational document for doing conservation.

But when you get to the point about other tools, Eric, I think we prioritize using tools that will set us up for our other tool better. So obviously we need to raise money to buy land. We also grow relationships in order to buy land, whether it's with a landowner, or with a partner, or with an elected official who can help direct funding to a project. Those relationships are critically, critically important. And then the other question is: what do we do with the land once we have it? That gets to the long tail of conservation. Everybody thinks about conservation as this discreet thing that happens. You buy the land, you put a fence around it, you stick a sign in, and it's done. It's conserved. But it's not. Our job is to conserve land and then protect those wildlife values, those agricultural values, those public access values in perpetuity. And that's a super long time. It's an obligation we take really seriously. It's a very long-term, noble occupation, the stewardship of land and the stewardship of conservation values. It's expensive, so we have to raise more money for stewardship. It requires people, so we have to either have people on staff who can do it, or work with partners who can. And we do. We work very closely with organizations like the Watsonville Wetlands Watch, the Resource Conservation District of Santa Cruz County, even the Prescribed Burn Association, all of these partners that help us maximize the conservation value of a property.

Eric Ressler [00:15:25]: I'd be curious to hear your take on the state of play of the broader conservation movement right now. My sense, working with you and observing your work and just paying attention in general, is that there have been some pretty major shifts in how the sector at large thinks about conservation. I think specifically about this glass dome protect versus access, and the deeper meaning between the community and the community's land and wildlife. What's your point of view on all of that at this stage right now?

Sarah Newkirk [00:16:00]: It's a super good question. And it has evolved. I'm fortunate to be old enough to remember how it was done in the early 2000s, and it was very much... I remember conversations at the Nature Conservancy when we were asking ourselves, and the CEO was going around the country asking various chapters, "Should we deal with this climate change thing?" It's laughable now, right? Because of course it is the thing that is shaping all of our work. But what you're asking about is something a little different: the role of people and the community in the conservation enterprise. The Land Trust of Santa Cruz County is fairly unique among conservation groups in California in that we serve three specific conservation beneficiaries. One is wildlife and natural resources. The second is agriculture, that our community in Santa Cruz County has a very robust, very progressive agricultural industry. And when I say agriculture, I mean ranching, I mean forestry, I mean row crop agriculture. Our working lands community are big partners. But our third beneficiary is people. Public access is expressly built into our mission. Even if it wasn't expressly built into our mission, giving people access to beautiful land and nature is the most mind-opening thing you can possibly imagine. If you want to inspire future conservationists, you bring kids out to nature. If you want to inspire gifts to conservation enterprises, you bring donors out to nature. There is nothing more motivating than actually being out there and feeling it, just being quiet for a second and listening to the sounds, feeling the air. Every piece of property is different. It almost has a terroir, almost the experience of being at a conservation property. We are so fortunate to have such interesting places to bring people to. Your listeners should be encouraged to go and become members of the Land Trust. It costs five dollars. You can give whatever you want, but you don't have to give much. And then you can be invited to all of these extraordinary opportunities to experience these extraordinary places. We have public offerings too, but members get a lot of special treatment.

Eric Ressler [00:18:40]: Well, and if you're listening from anywhere in the world, a trip to Santa Cruz is never a bad idea.

Sarah Newkirk [00:18:45]: It's a great idea.

Eric Ressler [00:18:45]: I think that's something. In our community here in Santa Cruz, there seems to be a nearly universal appreciation, a care ethos around nature. I think it takes a certain type of person to want to live here, or if you were born here, to figure out how to get creative enough to afford to stay and live here. And I think everyone, and this is a bit of a generalization, but most people have some kind of connection to nature, whether it's because you're a surfer, or a mountain biker, or a hiker, or an equestrian, or you just like being surrounded by all of this. At the same time, there's that local perspective that people here have, that I have, even though I'm not originally from Santa Cruz. And then I see these national, international, and global conversations around climate that feel so detached from that experience, where nature is a resource to be extracted, or nature is a thing that isn't as relevant in our fully digital world. So to your point about getting people into nature: that's how we create current donors, future conservationists, and even just a reconnection between our humanity and the environment that we all are in, as much as we try to remove ourselves from it. To me, it's the most important thing to focus on right now. And there's all kinds of research, I'm sure you're even more familiar than I am, that the experience of being in nature, the awe you experience, literally changes your brainwaves, literally changes your physiology. Anyone who's had experiences like that, it's self-evident. You don't need to be put in an MRI machine to know that's true. So I guess my question, after all of this, is how do we connect local conservation and local and individual natural experiences all the way up to global climate change, when a lot of those decisions are being made by global and international climate policy decision-makers who feel like they might as well be as far removed from any individual as possible? I don't have any access to the UN. On behalf of my clients I do, to some degree, but there's that sense of: what can I do as an everyday citizen, an individual who cares passionately about this?

Sarah Newkirk [00:21:15]: While it's a troubling time to be a person in the world right now, it's not a troubling time to be a person in Santa Cruz County right now. It's also not a troubling time to be a person in California right now. We live in a community that is really willing, that has an appetite for innovation and for pushing the boundaries of what's possible on climate action. We live in a state that puts its money where its mouth is. In 2024, California passed Prop 4, the $10 billion climate bond. That bond is now generating revenue for conservation organizations like ours to do the work we do. There's no place else in the world that supports conservation to the extent California does. Santa Cruz County in 2024 passed Measure Q, the water and fire resilience property tax measure, which is generating seven million dollars a year for public agencies, for nonprofits, for the grant program, so we can all do work that makes our community more resilient to climate change. So I have a lot of reason to hope. To your question of how we connect that to the national scene and the global scene: we need to lean into this kind of thing, to the local. We need to be talking about what we're doing here, and we need to be convincing people that life is good here because of these investments we're making.

Eric Ressler [00:23:15]: Hey friends, real quick before we continue today's episode. I'm Eric Ressler, founder and creative director at Cosmic. Cosmic is a creative agency purpose-built for nonprofits and mission-driven organizations. For the last 15 years, we've helped leaders like you nail your impact story and sharpen your strategy, but we're not here to just leave you with a fancy slide deck and a pat on the back. We roll up our sleeves and help you bring your ideas to life through campaigns, creative, and digital experiences. Our work together helps you earn trust, connect deeply with your supporters, and grow your fundraising and your impact. If you value the thinking we share here and want it applied to your biggest challenges, let's talk at designbycosmic.com. All right, back to today's conversation.

I love that where you took that. We've been talking about this with various guests, and Jonathan and I have been talking about it in various episodes as well, that in the climate advocacy space, especially around climate change, there's been so much messaging around the potential downsides, and now we're getting to the point where it's the realized downsides, right? Coastal erosion, rising sea levels, communities being impacted like today. There's been very little discussion, narrative change, and visioning around what could be instead. Not "we need to do this or else," but "here's what this could look like if we did it this way." I think that's a real shame, because I think that's actually more motivating for an issue like climate action. There are some issues where painting a picture about the downsides makes a lot of sense, maybe to a degree. Public health is a space where that sometimes works, like disease prevention, although that doesn't seem to be working so well either right now. But for an issue like this, where it's so easy to tip into apathy, where it's just like, well, I can't do anything. The metaphor I've used before is it feels sometimes like you're an ant trying to push a glacier for an issue of this size. My sense is that if instead there was a "here's what the world could look like, here's what our community could look like if we were to make these changes, if we were to make these investments instead," that would be a much more generative, constructive, inspirational, creative act. So why isn't that happening?

Sarah Newkirk [00:25:30]: I think people get trapped by this "has never been done" mindset, and that leads to the "it can never be done" mindset. I prefer to ask the question of what would have to be true. When we first started talking about Measure Q, it was, one of my trustees came to me on my first day on the job and said, "You know what you need to do? You need to do a local conservation measure." And I said, "Okay," because I was too stupid to know—

Eric Ressler [00:26:15]: How hard that was going to be.

Sarah Newkirk [00:26:20]: And so, of course, we had years of conversations about it, and mostly the conversations I was having with stakeholders were conversations about how it couldn't, that's been tried before, it's been tried two or three times before, and we think it can't be done, it's never going to happen here. So I had to have a come-to-Jesus moment with my board where I said, "I'm just not sure about this, but let's brainstorm, because I think that if the following things were true, we might be able to succeed." If we were able to get a simple majority threshold for victory, we might succeed. If we were able to couch this in terms of the natural world and risk reduction, climate risk reduction, nature protection and climate risk reduction are fundamentally the same thing, or can be accomplished using many of the same tools. And if we're able to convey that message to the public, they might support something they might otherwise not support. So we did this exercise: what would have to be true in order to succeed, rather than why has this not succeeded? And we answered those questions and we took care of those relationships. Some of the things that needed to be true were that we needed a robust coalition. We needed the Farm Bureau on our side, and they were. We needed a lot of landowners on our side. We needed all of the supervisors on our side, and we got them. So we made a list of what had to be true, and we made those things true.

Eric Ressler [00:28:05]: I just want to underline that strategy to our listeners right now, because I feel like we do something similar when we're doing visioning exercises on behalf of our clients. I think it's such a powerful framework, because sometimes going from where you are and who you are as an organization to who you're becoming, you see where you want to go and you see where you are, and that gap just looks like it might as well be the Grand Canyon. But if you start to break it down into, I'm going to use your words here, the "what would have to be true" for us to be able to get there, you start to tease out the mini steps that get you closer and closer, which can help you figure out: is this viable at all? Do we think we can get seven out of ten of these, or whatever the threshold might be, to get it over the finish line? Do we need to get all ten? So I want to underline that as a brilliant leadership and strategy framework in terms of feasibility of a major initiative, or even just how to break big ambitious problems down into their pieces to be more effective in general. So I want to point out that you talk about this coalition you had to build, all of these people you had to get on your side. I'd love to give you a chance to talk about, you've mentioned this a couple times already, relationship building. You talked about it through the lens of fundraising. Now you're talking about it through the lens of advocacy or politics at a local level. Whose responsibility is that in an organization like yours? Is it the whole org? Is it the ED? How do you think about breaking that down into pragmatic steps that you take?

Sarah Newkirk [00:29:45]: What an interesting question. In our organization, relationships are held by different departments. We have relationships that are primarily about engaging with the public, and we have an engagement department that holds those relationships. We have relationships that are primarily about external, or government, affairs, and we have a department that does that. We have relationships with landowners, and our land protection department does that. We have relationships with scientists and other practitioner partners, and we have a department of conservation strategy and planning. But I think the importance of relationships, and the foundational power it gives an organization to have productive relationships in which each partner is experiencing significant benefit, those are the really useful, productive relationships.

Eric Ressler [00:30:45]: The win-win relationships.

Sarah Newkirk [00:30:45]: The win-win relationships, exactly. And it's not transactional in the sense of I'm winning, you're winning, and we're all winning. It is truly an authentic relationship, because the foundational question is: can what I do as my business model serve you in some way? For landowners, often what they're experiencing is a crisis of capital. So what we do in purchasing a conservation easement can really help them. We had a land deal recently with the Estrada family, who have a large historic ranch, and there were a number of different family members who owned different portions of the ranch. What needed to happen was it needed to be brought together under the unified ownership of the next generation that was going to operate the ranch. But what they really needed was some funding to operate it. So we were able to come in and purchase a conservation easement that protected the land from development in perpetuity, but also put it in the hands of some very capable and progressive land stewards who are doing an immaculate job of caring for it. We don't have to do that. But that took a years-long process of building a relationship. What's wonderful is that now we have that relationship, and we have those partners who are able to speak to their community on our behalf. And you don't get that unless the relationship is really a productive, mutually beneficial, but also authentic, not strictly transactional, relationship.

Eric Ressler [00:32:40]: I want to spend a little time talking about the relationship with the public that you mentioned, because to me that feels like something I wouldn't necessarily expect with a land trust. Maybe you tell me, is this a unique flavor of land trust that you are, that does this? Because I could imagine a version of you where this is all behind-the-scenes policy wonk work and real estate work, and the public doesn't really need to know you exist. You're just going to do good work behind the scenes for them. But you guys have taken a very different stance, where you're a very well-known, almost household name in our community, a beloved brand. We experienced this in doing the rebrand, just how much equity and care people had for the Land Trust as an organization, as a brand. Why do you think it is that you've set it up that way? Is that intentional? Is that just culturally something you inherited? Why does the public need to know who the Land Trust is?

Sarah Newkirk [00:33:35]: The public doesn't need to know, but they would get substantial joy from knowing and being engaged with us, because what we have to offer is incomparably beautiful and incomparably valuable. And just as you said, Eric, earlier in the interview, people in Santa Cruz County, on the whole, are here on purpose. The main purpose they're here for is being able to connect with some component of the natural world, whether it's the forests, the trails, the surf break, whatever. If you're not out surfing, you're at the downtown farmer's market buying your strawberries for the week. People are here on purpose to take advantage of the resources this incredible county has to offer. So I think people should know about the Land Trust, because we are their representative in making sure that these resources, that make this county so incredible, are able to stay around for the long term and provide all the joy, all the nutrition, all the mental and physical health that comes with being outside, for generations to come. That is, in fact, our mission.

The other thing is that I work with the most incredible staff. We have a staff of about 32 people. They're mostly about 20 years younger than me, and they are having such an amazing time. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to learn more about the atmosphere of our enterprise to visit our downtown office at 911 Center Street, and just come and talk, come and see what we're up to, come and look at the map of our properties, come and talk to some of our conservation practitioners, and hear about the work we're doing to conserve and give access to the public for all of these values we're protecting. My team is part of what makes the Land Trust the Land Trust, and it's part of what makes Santa Cruz Santa Cruz. Interacting with the public is something that brings me great joy. It brings my team great joy. And it really is part of the recipe for an organization that can create major conservation impact.

Eric Ressler [00:36:15]: So one of the questions we often ask when we're doing case for support work for major donors is: what would happen if your organization were to disappear? I actually kind of want to flip that, and I want to press on this one more time, because I'd love you to connect the dots for our listeners. What would happen to the Land Trust and your impact if your public stakeholders were to disappear? I want to ask that through the lens of a belief I have, which is that too many climate action and conservation organizations don't consider the general public a major stakeholder, especially if they're grasstops, especially if they're global advocacy. There's this kind of, well, these decisions get made behind closed doors, so no one really needs to know who we are. And I don't believe that's true. So I'd like you to tell me your authentic answer, whether you agree or disagree with my point of view there. How would your work change if the general public here in Santa Cruz County and beyond were not a major stakeholder in the work you were doing?

Sarah Newkirk [00:37:20]: We would probably still have some lands. I think we would probably primarily be working with conservation easements, where we were able to buy cheap and incomplete. There's nothing wrong with easements. Sometimes an easement is the right tool for the job. But we would probably be limited to those kinds of conservation agreements, because we wouldn't be able to afford much else, and because we wouldn't be able to generate a lot of interest or excitement in doing a full fee transaction. And I say that because, again, it's these relationships within the community that are generating landowner interest, that let people know there's an option for their property other than selling it to a developer. I think that if the public were not there, a big component of the vision we have for this county, which is of a thriving, economically viable, recreationally active population that supports conservation because it's in their enlightened best interest, if you will... I think we would probably still exist. We would be less successful, and we would be fundamentally less joyful. I think the dissemination of hope that the Land Trust's work brings to the community would also be kind of absent. And I think, Eric, that's the real story. That's what the other levels of organization of this country and the globe need to hear: when you provide this kind of conservation work, this kind of climate adaptation work, to the broader public, the public loves it, and therefore they love you. And that is, I think, again, a beautiful, virtuous cycle.

Eric Ressler [00:39:30]: I love that the answer is joy. I think we need a lot more joy in how this work happens. And to your point, that's already going on right now. So Sarah, before we wrap up, this was so great. Thank you so much. I'd love for you to have a chance to plug anything and everything you'd like. How can people get involved who are here in Santa Cruz County or in California, and how can listeners who are elsewhere in the US or the world, who are listening, what would your advice to them be if they're interested in conservation and wanting to get involved in their local communities?

Sarah Newkirk [00:40:00]: I encourage all of our local listeners to join up. We have a community, it's an exciting community. We do all of these events where we're bringing folks out onto the land to really experience lands that not everybody really gets to connect with. So go to our website, sign up, and become a member. It doesn't cost very much at all, but obviously we'll happily receive any contribution folks want to offer. For people outside of our community, take a look at what we're doing, take a look at what we're up to. Our website has dozens of videos showing our work in action. There are lots of articles showing our work in action.

Eric Ressler [00:40:55]: You have your own podcast.

Sarah Newkirk [00:40:55]: We have our own podcast, the Learning the Land podcast, that elaborates on the programmatic work we're doing and the values it's bringing and protecting for our community. And then tell your own local land trusts the story of the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County: conservation incubator, coming up with new ideas, figuring out what would have to be true and making it happen, because it's not impossible. There are just obstacles. And let us know what you find out. I would love for it to be an exchange of information, and I would love for our listeners elsewhere in the world and in the country to be able to bring this back home.

Eric Ressler [00:41:50]: Absolutely. So join up if you're local, or if you're not. If you are a generous donor and want to see your money go somewhere that's going to make a real impact here in Santa Cruz, you would be at the top of my list personally. Sarah, this has been wonderful. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Sarah Newkirk [00:42:05]: Thanks, Eric. I appreciate the opportunity.