Society for Wilderness Stewardship

Background Statement

Over the last five years, SWS has grown it's annual budget from $20,000 to over $800,000. We have done this purposefully, guided by our strategic plan and a financial plan, both of which were focused on becoming stable and sustainable. Together, these plans called for us to do four important things: establish and maintain key relationships throughout our constituency to inform programming and initiatives, build out our core of mission delivery by designing programs that embodied our mission, fund those programs with self-sustaining earned income models, and maintain a high level of quality in programs.

We grew strategic relationships across the country, first by identifying key partners, and then by meeting with them and asking them what kinds of support they needed from us. From those discussions, we build out programs that delivered our mission and what our stakeholders were looking for. That is where our three core programs (Wilderness Fellows, NWW and Training and Education) came from. All of those programs are earned income programs, which are self-sustaining. To ensure their fiscal strength and health, we have continued to diversify our fiscal grants and agreements that fund that work. In addition, we have worked hard to ensure quality in each part of our programming so that people want to keep engaging with these programs. The result has been a level of organizational stability, even in the face of the 2018 government shutdown and grant funding pause, and thus far in the 2019 pandemic, that allows us to expand our mission delivery from a strong foundation.

Beyond those strategic initiatives, we place a high emphasis on being a learning organization, continually evaluating our work and growth, and maintaining our ability to be nimble, flexible, aware and intelligent. We believe that those attributes contribute significantly to maintaining organizational sustainability.

SWS currently has three primary programs that we employ: the Wilderness Fellows Program, the National Wilderness Workshop, and Training & Education.

The Wilderness Fellows Program engages young professionals in wilderness management projects across the country. These projects create capacity for wilderness managers, complete important wilderness stewardship work, and provide Fellows with valuable experience and federal hiring priority to pursue the next step in their career. Since the start of the Wilderness Fellows Program in 2016, we have seen 95% placement of Fellows in federal and NGO career-track positions, or further career-track academic study.

The National Wilderness Workshop (NWW) grew out of the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act conference in 2014. Now in its sixth year, the NWW brings wilderness managers, stakeholders, volunteers, academics and enthusiasts from around the country together to work on emerging wilderness management issues. Each year, we identify a theme of the workshop, and take pride in choosing themes that challenge the wilderness stewardship community to grow together. In 2020, the NWW is slated to take place at the University of California at Merced, one of the most diverse college campuses in the country, and is focused on the theme of Ecological Change. We have a 25-person planning committee working to ensure the workshop is cutting-edge, reaches new heights of inclusivity, and tackles wilderness issues in a meaningful way.

In our Training and Education programs, SWS works with groups and agencies around the country to put on wilderness field trainings. In addition, SWS works with the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center and Indiana University's Eppley Institute to offer a Wilderness Stewardship Certificate that trains students in wilderness management. Our training and Education programs engage hundreds of people each year.

This year marks the start of a new 5-year strategic plan for SWS, and the culmination of our prior 5-year strategic plan. From 2015-2020, we achieved much: we grew our programs from one to three, number of annual program participants from 30 to 740, partners from two to 150, budget from $20k to over $800k, and employees from zero to 22.

The objective in SWS' new strategic plan is to: "Grow a vibrant and inclusive wilderness stewardship community by providing excellent mission-driven programming and strengthening organizational capacity, funding and leadership." We have identified five strategies to complete this work, two of which relate directly to the building out of the Club Wild Program: create new mission delivery, and grow a diverse and inclusive wilderness stewardship community. We have placed a spotlight on creating new mission delivery specifically to develop community-facing initiatives that strengthen the connection between the public and their wilderness resources, and to work toward our goal of engaging the next generation in experiential wilderness education.