Sand County Foundation’s mission is to advance the use of ethical and scientifically sound land management practices and partnerships for the benefit of people and the ecological landscape.

At Sand County Foundation, we realize that reliance on regulation-driven environmental compliance will not provide protection of our ecological heritage. The traditional governmental approach has too often been punitive or onerous to the landholder—and has, too often, ignored the cultural, historical, and practical capital of the relationship between people and the places they hold dear.

Further, we believe there must be a broader understanding of private conservation that means more than acquiring land to create “preserves” or encumbering land in order to “protect” it. Prohibiting or constraining human uses of natural resources will not encourage long term, sustainable, innovative solutions to conservation challenges.

Sand County Foundation enlists the ingenuity and connection that people have with the lands and resources they hold to solve environmental issues. Our focus derives from Leopold’s land ethic— sound, voluntary environmentalism that depends on private ownership and stewardship. We focus our work on fostering, facilitating, and supporting private individuals and local communities to manage, benefit from, and strengthen tenure over lands and natural resources.

We are achieving this mission by:

• Making strategic investments of financial, technical, and organizational resources to support private individuals as primary agents of long term landscape scale conservation
• Providing public recognition of outstanding private conservation leadership and rewarding responsible stewards as to inspire others by their example.
• Serving as a conduit and facilitator for landholder/stakeholder conservation information between and among private individuals, scientists, funders, and policymakers
• Supporting policies to remove regulatory barriers and create positive incentives for citizen participation in habitat improvement.
  

Sand County Foundation is a private non-profit organization dedicated to working with private landholders to improve natural habitats on their land.