February 2010 Common Ground

This year, The Conservation Fund turns 25. The Fund has grown from a good idea into a conservation leader – protecting over 6.4 million acres in all 50 states, touching communities coast to coast and saving special places for our kids to discover and enjoy. Here, one Fund staffer, Mikki Sager, shares her career in conservation.

Mikki Sager was resourceful from the start. Growing up in suburban Pennsylvania, Sager and her three siblings turned the creek behind their house into an ice rink and converted the overturned tree in their backyard into a lookout tower. Sager kept on adventuring, ultimately becoming a competitive kayaker and canoe racer, selling whitewater apparel and working as a guide to the thrills of kayaking, hiking and climbing in western North Carolina.

This is a woman who gets the power of “place.”

But Sager, 58, also gets people. And it’s this combination – place and people – that has defined her role at The Conservation Fund for nearly two decades. Sager heads our Resourceful Communities Program (RCP). RCP helps underserved – typically rural, minority and low-wealth – communities in North Carolina find new ways to develop sustainably. Sager and her team of 5 train community leaders and small business owners, and foster peer-to-peer learning to help communities “create new economies” that work on the so-called “triple bottom line”: environmental, economic and social returns-on-investment.

That bottom line suits us well. What makes the Fund different from most environmental organizations is our dual mission – to not only protect our environment but also strengthen our economy. “Rather than pitting people against each other and telling them they have to choose between jobs / development and clean air / water, we help them figure out ways to do both,” Sager says. “We help them balance the priorities in their lives, use limited resources more wisely and effectively and make better places for future generations to live and work well.”

The seeds of RCP were sown in 1990, when Sager and veteran Fund staffer Dick Ludington, 63, were approached by residents of Tyrrell County, N.C. A big conservation project had taken land off the county tax rolls, costing the small community needed revenue. Listening to community concerns and knowing the region’s potential, Ludington hatched an idea: build a community center, with bike and kayak rentals, youth conservationists and more to create jobs and businesses from the region’s rich natural resources. He asked Sager to write a grant proposal – her first.

To Sager’s delight, her grant request of $24,000 was accepted – but only as a match, requiring her to raise twice that amount from other sources. Rising to the challenge, she succeeded – and an idea was soon born.

Since then, RCP has enjoyed several watershed moments, including the program’s first annual “Grassroots Convening,” in 2001 – a statewide gathering of community, government, business and environmental leaders who met to share ideas and forge new partnerships. The event, a resounding success, stuck: This year, over 125 partners participated in Grassroots Convening 13.

Each year, RCP partners share ways to farm sustainably, say, or develop businesses that use natural resources well. As a result, their communities are less forced to choose between a healthy environment or decent jobs but instead work toward solutions that provide both, while confronting issues of social justice.

Well beyond these grassroots meetings, Sager says, her work is all about listening. She has negotiated in board rooms, walked farms with property owners, debated in parking lots, presented in community centers and spent enough time talking on road trips that the numbers on her cell phone smudged away. Through it all, she has gleaned some powerful lessons by listening. One subsistence farmer frankly informed the RCP team that when you live off the land, conservation is neither something you buy with a $15 membership nor something you do on a hike on the weekends. It’s something you do – or you die.

“That gave me such an appreciation for people’s connection to the land,” Sager recalls. “It’s this human dynamic – all the challenges of people and place – that makes our work so meaningful.”

Click here to learn more about the Resourceful Communities Program.