NEFF Celebrates Land Trust Accreditation

Eighty years after its founding, NEFF is the nation’s sixth largest land trust

New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF) celebrated its 80th birthday in July 2024, and we’re pleased to have a grand accomplishment with which to commemorate the year: the Land Trust Accreditation Commission, an independent program of the Land Trust Alliance (LTA), has awarded NEFF accreditation!

Accreditation recognizes the highest national standards for excellence and conservation permanence, and NEFF has now joined a network of 471 organizations that have reached this same milestone. We are in good company, and stronger than ever.

NEFF was also honored to receive this commendation from the LTA Accreditation Commission: “New England Forestry Foundation has made an extraordinary commitment to excellence, trust, and permanence in land conservation. The Commission especially recognizes NEFF for its successful initiative to convene, plan, and anchor the New England Climate-Smart Commodities Partnership, for the quality of its supplemental baseline documentation reports,* and for its publication Into the Woods.”

The Journey to Accreditation

To get the full story behind NEFF’s accreditation, we turn back the clock to March 2022, when then-Stewardship Associate (now-Stewardship Manager) Beth Gula agreed to devote over half of her worktime to overseeing and preparing NEFF’s application for accreditation, while newly hired Stewardship Associate Corey Wrinn took on some of her former duties.

Stewardship Manager Beth Gula in the Green Mountain National Forest. Photo by Beth Sebian.

The Land Trust Accreditation Commission runs the rigorous accreditation process that became a core feature of Beth’s professional life. The first sign of this shift? NEFF staff and Board members quickly grew familiar with the concise and compelling graphics Beth used to track our accreditation progress through this complex but worthwhile process.

“Earning Land Trust Accreditation is a major victory for NEFF, our staff, our supporters, and our partners,” said NEFF Executive Director Bob Perschel. “It’s also an incredible accomplishment for Beth and her team, who have dedicated two years of detailed work to this project.”

LTA defines twelve Land Trust Standards and Practices that “describe how to operate a land trust legally, ethically and in the public interest,” and accreditation verifies compliance with these guidelines. NEFF’s Board of Directors voted to adopt the Standards and Practices in 2017. While much of our operating procedure is consistent with those guiding principles, the accreditation process highlighted certain areas in which NEFF needed to make changes. Take Standard 9, “Ensuring Sound Transactions,” which has notable ramifications for 80-year-old organizations seeking accreditation. Among other things, it has recordkeeping elements that call for land trusts to:

• Adopt a written records policy that governs how and when organization and transaction records are created, collected, retained, stored and destroyed.
• Keep originals of all documents essential to the defense of each real property transaction in a secure manner and protected from damage or loss.
• Create and keep copies of these documents in a manner such that both originals and copies are not destroyed in a single calamity.

What does this mean for an organization that has been accepting land donations since 1945, well before modern recordkeeping standards were in place?

For Beth, meeting Standard 9’s requirements meant paper cuts, dust on her clothes, spreadsheets, feeding pages through a scanner, and pulling out boxes from hidden cubbyholes, closets and cabinets in the upper floors of the old Prouty house that now serves as NEFF headquarters in Littleton, MA.

“With help from staffers like Corey Wrinn and Executive Assistant Meaghan Guyader, I flipped page by page through decades of records,” said Beth. “We pulled a range of essential records, including original recorded deeds, charitable gift tax forms, and critical correspondence such as letters that communicate donor intent.”

Beth and her team then relocated documents to secure fireproof storage cabinets and digitized the documents so duplicates live on NEFF’s secure server.

“It was eye-opening to realize much of those early files are the equivalent of an email inbox for NEFF’s staff team, just one from decades ago where each message is printed and saved,” Beth continued. “The recordkeeping elements of this process guide what physical pieces of paper are essential to secure and protect versus what might not need to take up space in a permanent file.”

The Land Trust Accreditation application process culminated with the announcement of NEFF’s accreditation in February 2024, while continuing to implement the Standards and Practices is ongoing during the five-year term. NEFF is the United States’ sixth-largest land trust, and accreditation is now another feather in our land trust cap.

How Many Acres?

When NEFF staffers were preparing to announce the organization’s accreditation, we decided to see where NEFF ranked among other land trusts by acres conserved. Our land conservation team had reason to suspect NEFF would be toward the top of the list.

LTA’s most recent National Land Trust Census was conducted in 2020, so NEFF staff asked LTA for the largest land trusts by acres conserved as of the census, and then accounted for the progress each has made since 2020 to produce this list of the United States’ current largest land trusts.

1. The Nature Conservancy: 125 million acres
2. The Conservation Fund: 8.8 million acres
3. Trust for Public Land: 3.9 million acres
4. Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation: 1.5 million acres
5. Montana Land Reliance: 1.29 million acres
6. New England Forestry Foundation: 1.21 million acres
7. Forest Society of Maine: 959,000 acres
8. Vermont Land Trust: 824,100+ acres
9. Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust: 765,000+ acres
10. Colorado Open Lands: 677,607 acres

What’s Next?

NEFF staff and Board members plan to celebrate the accreditation at the Land Trust Alliance’s Rally 2024 this September in Providence, RI, and hope to see other members of the NEFF community there.

Our Thanks

NEFF thanks all of its staff members for the parts they played in this success, and also recognizes the accomplishments of Beth and those who directly played a role (though a few have departed NEFF in the past year): Sophie Anthony, David Ayers, Andrew Bentley, Bonnie Cody, Thiciane Costa, Will Brune, Kim Doherty, Penny Flynn, Maria Garcia, Meaghan Guyader, Tinsley Hunsdorfer, Tiffany Mierop, Bob Perschel, Chris Pryor, Lindsay Sherman, Donna Sibley and Corey Wrinn.

Stewardship staff began preparing for accreditation years before NEFF formally expressed its intent to apply, and efforts by past staff members, including Betsy Cook and Carson Hauck, paved the way for new policies and protocols that aligned with the Standards and Practices. NEFF’s thanks go to them as well.

NEFF is also grateful to Attorney Ray Lyons, who helped guide policy creation and was always available for advice; to those who submitted public comments about NEFF’s application; and to the French Foundation for its financial support of this effort. Finally, accreditation would not have been possible without the dedication of the NEFF Board of Directors, who supported and tracked each step of the accreditation process. Board President Rick Weyerhauser and Board Clerk Anne Stetson, who guided the Records Policy creation, provided particular leadership.

*Supplemental baseline documentation reports document the current conditions of an existing conservation easement (CE) and are prepared when there are significant changes to the land or the CE, such as when an easement is amended to strengthen its protections or add land, or when an ownership subdivision occurs. The report documents the important conservation values protected by the easement and the relevant conditions of the property as necessary to monitor and enforce the easement.