Gateway Community Initiative In Michigan

Waterloo Recreation Area in Michigan is a little-known treasure. About an hour drive from Ann Arbor, this 20,000-acre park is the largest in the lower peninsula and shares a 36-mile hiking trail with Pinckney State Recreation Area. Yet there wasn’t much to entice visitors or local residents to explore this pristine wilderness and all of the recreational opportunities it offers. Only one exit from the highway leads to the park, and the local communities had virtually no relationship with the vast wilderness at their border.

One exception was in Chelsea where a painted wooden sign in the town center declares it is “The Gateway to the Waterloo-Pinckney Recreation Area” (right). Bob Pierce, a Chelsea community leader, knew most people wouldn’t think of his community as a gateway to these recreation areas. The challenge was how to make it one.

It was a chance encounter with Fund staff at a Racing for Wildlife event that led Bob and a few of his colleagues to attend The Conservation Leadership Network’s Balancing Commerce and Nature course at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. The course, designed to bring community leaders and public land managers together, teaches communities to make the most of their proximity to public lands while also protecting the natural resources of the area and the character of the community.

Bob and his colleagues left the course inspired and with an action plan to create The Gateway Communities Initiative brought together leaders from the communities bordering the Waterloo Recreation Area and other local public lands including Manchester, Dexter, Pinckney, Stockbridge and Eastern Jackson County. Every month for one year community leaders, including the Fund’s Ann Arbor-based Ginny Trocchio, met to discuss how to develop a better infrastructure and identity opportunities that would enhance both the public lands and their communities.

The group invited The Conservation Leadership Network to Michigan to kick off the initiative with a three-day Balancing Commerce and Nature workshop tailored to the specific needs of the communities and the Waterloo-Pinckney recreation areas. Led by the Fund’s Kendra Briechle, the course provided information on the value of conservation, the benefits of and opportunities from fostering sustainable tourism, and the prospect of enhanced place-based education for the area’s young people.

The workshop also provided local leaders with an opportunity to develop action plans for making the most of the relationship between the communities and the neighboring recreation areas. The course has had a real impact in the area. Manchester is developing a historical tour as a model for other themed tours that Manchester and other communities can use, Dexter has proposed building an information center at the east entrance to the park, and Chelsea has pledged to create better signs to direct visitors to the park.

Another great result of the Gateway Communities Initiative is the appreciation residents of these towns now have for the surrounding public lands. There is greater community awareness that the public lands can be a source of economic development as well as community pride.

The Balancing Commerce and Nature course has sparked a true partnership between Chelsea and the other communities bordering the Waterloo-Pinckney park lands. They now have a positive relationship with the public lands they border, one that encourages economic growth and community building as they work to provide resources and recreational opportunities for visitors and residents. We have no doubt that these Michigan communities will be models of how to balance nature with development for other towns that border public lands in the state.

Photos (from top): Chelsea's downtown storefronts; Sign in downtown Chelsea declaring it the "gateway" to Waterloo-Pinckney Recreation Area; Kendra Briechle of The Conservation Fund leads a session at the Balancing Commerce and Nature workshop in Michigan (all photos by TCF).