Celebrating 75 Years of People, Partnership and Place

When The Nature Conservancy was founded 75 years ago, it was created by a group of ecologists who wanted to do more than just study nature from an ivory tower. They saw a growing threat from bulldozers and chainsaws, and they wanted to protect the natural places where they found inspiration for their research.

The Nature Conservancy’s first executive director, George Fell, moved from Illinois to Washington, D.C., to start the organization in 1951 entirely as a volunteer (his wife, Barbara, was also a dedicated Nature Conservancy volunteer, and she took a job as a medical technician to support them). Together with TNC President Richard Pough, the small team laid the groundwork for a new kind of membership organization that could mobilize people to take direct conservation action.

The fledgling team’s first big opportunity came at Mianus Gorge near Bedford, New York, when community members facing the loss of a beloved forest to housing developers chose an audacious path—they offered to buy it. They organized bake sales, pledged their life-insurance policies and approached the newly formed TNC for help with the $30,000 purchase. With the financing secured and the 60-acre property forever protected, a new kind of global conservation movement was born.

I believe this pioneering vision—the idea that we can all play a part in protecting nature—is still at the heart of what we do today. I have seen this inspiration play out in communities around the world: When people come together to protect a place they love, extraordinary conservation is possible.

This simple idea that took root 75 years ago has grown far beyond the original vision set forth by that group of scientists in 1951. Today, we’ve scaled our reach to all 50 U.S. states and are working in 83 countries and territories, with a global team that includes more than 1,000 scientists. We have conserved more than 125 million acres of land and 2.3 billion acres of ocean area—cumulatively protecting an area almost the size of the entire United States.

People, partnership and place are the enduring elements of our DNA. Grounded in science, this foundation has guided us from the very beginning and carried us from local action to global impact.

That was immediately clear to me when I joined as CEO in the spring of 2020. I stepped into an organization powered by hundreds of thousands of dedicated and passionate individuals around the world—staff members, volunteer leaders, donors, members, partners and local communities—people united by a shared commitment to protect nature and keep our work moving forward.

Since then, I’ve spent time with many of our teams around the world witnessing firsthand the passion that drives our work on the ground. Whether restoring oyster reefs in the Chesapeake Bay, planting mangrove seedlings in Mexico, removing invasive species with a women-led field crew team in South Africa’s Cape Town watershed, joining a prescribed burn in southern Virginia or restoring coral reefs in the Caribbean, I’ve seen again and again that lasting conservation begins with people who care—guided by science, strengthened by deep local knowledge and made possible through genuine partnership with the communities closest to the work.

The strength of our work begins locally, where people come together to care for the lands and waters they love and the natural systems that sustain us all. It’s a message I hear repeatedly in conversations with field staff who steward the lands, with donors who deeply care about TNC’s mission, and with the nearly 1,600 local TNC volunteer trustees who serve as trusted advisors, ambassadors, fundraisers and advocates who all help translate our mission into action on the ground.

At TNC, people aren’t just the driving force behind our work—they are the heart of our conservation approach. All of our work is grounded in solutions that support both nature and people. We see that in our coastal resilience efforts that protect shoreline ecosystems while sustaining fisheries and food security. It’s part of our community‑led forest and grassland stewardship projects that support biodiversity while benefiting local economies. Our approach to conservation is never just about protecting places—it’s also about improving lives.

Just as people are at the heart of our work, partnership is what enables us to go further together. Change at a transformative scale cannot be achieved by any one person or organization. The spirit of radical collaboration—working together with unexpected and diverse partners—is enabling us to achieve things we cannot do alone.

We see this commitment to partnership reflected across our work, including in one of our most ambitious endeavors yet: Enduring Earth. This collaboration between TNC, The Pew Charitable Trusts, World Wildlife Fund and ZOMA LAB has already delivered truly massive-scale conservation wins, securing an area larger than Mexico. So far, this partnership is helping to protect more than 550 million acres of land, ocean and fresh water across Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Mongolia, Namibia and Colombia.

Enduring Earth works by bringing together governments, communities, philanthropic partners and conservation groups around long-term conservation plans that are fully funded from the start. A key pillar of this model is community engagement; these plans are co-designed with local and Indigenous communities to integrate their cultural values and goals.

We are also using the power of partnership to tackle some of today’s most complex conservation challenges. For example, in the Pacific, through our Tuna Transparency Pledge, we are uniting key players across the seafood supply chain to combat overfishing and illegal activity by accelerating electronic monitoring across all industrial fishing vessels. By working with governments, industry leaders, retailers and coastal nations, we are helping to drive a shift in the tuna fleet toward 100% on-the-water monitoring, which is helping to reform fishing practices.

In these and many other examples, collaboration has become the catalyst for systemic change.

Through every step of TNC’s evolution, our work has remained deeply rooted in place. From our earliest efforts at New York’s Mianus Gorge to our recent work protecting landscapes around the world, our commitment to protecting the places that people love continues to shape who we are.

One of TNC’s unique strengths lies in our ability to innovate locally, prove what works for conservation and then carry those solutions to other places. Our Site Renewables Right tool—originally developed in the U.S. Midwest—is helping to identify already-altered lands across the U.S. where wind and solar can be built with minimal impact to biodiversity. This concept is now being used to guide clean-energy development around the world, including in India, Peru and Europe.

In Mexico, we piloted the world’s first-ever coral reef insurance policy to fund reef repair and restoration after hurricanes and then expanded that model to protect reefs in Hawaii. And we’ve now adapted this tool for California as a first-of-its-kind wildfire insurance that incentivizes forest management practices that reduce wildfire risk and protect biodiversity.

We have replicated the financial mechanism we pioneered in Seychelles—helping the island nation refinance national debt to unlock funding and technical expertise for marine conservation—to drive similar projects in five other countries, including Belize and Gabon. These Nature Bond projects, as we call them, are expected to unlock approximately $1 billion for nature, climate and communities.

Meeting today’s conservation challenges requires us to draw on everything that has always defined TNC—our investment in science, our willingness to innovate and our belief that collaboration moves the needle forward. Even as our work grows in scale and complexity, we continue to conserve important places the way we always have—through strategic land protection grounded in deep partnership with the people and communities who know these places best.

A recent landmark victory in Chile reflects those roots at their best. In the Cochamó Valley, a coalition led by local organization Puelo Patagonia—working alongside TNC and other committed philanthropic partners—brought together science, technical expertise, deep local knowledge and global connections to realize a bold, shared vision. Together, we raised an extraordinary $78 million to permanently protect 328,000 acres of pristine rivers, forests and mountains in the heart of Patagonia. The long-term management and stewardship of this remarkable landscape will be locally led, guided by a science-based conservation plan co-designed with communities—balancing strong protections with sustainable economic opportunities.

It’s easy to imagine our founders at Mianus Gorge recognizing something familiar in this moment of conservation success in Chile: the power of dedicated people coming together to protect a place they love.

Across all of our work, from land to ocean, from local action to global scale, one thing remains constant: Progress is driven by people united by shared purpose.

Our future will be written the same way our story began: through bold action and a deep commitment to the places that sustain us. As we look ahead, I am filled with optimism and determination because the same elements that sparked a conservation movement 75 years ago still define us today. People, partnership and place remain at the heart of everything we do, reminding us that protecting nature has always been a shared responsibility.

And as TNC’s next chapter unfolds, I thank you for your commitment and invite you to continue this journey with us to protect the nature on which all life depends. Thank you for your leadership, your partnership and your belief in the amazing outcomes that are possible when we come together to protect our natural world—now and for generations to come.