You've seen it: trailheads packed two miles down the road, campsites closed indefinitely, trails eroding into gullies, invasive plants choking out native wildflowers. This is wilderness degradation. Without expert stewardship, America's wilderness faces an uncertain future.
Without active management, our precious wildlands risk irreversible degradation. That's where SWS takes a stand. For 20 years, we've worked with land management agencies and researchers to safeguard 350+ wilderness areas, delivering essential monitoring, training, and expertise that empower effective stewardship of these remarkable natural treasures.
Land managers across the country have lauded the Society for Wilderness Stewardship for its support of high-quality wilderness management. Here in Colorado, SWS has achieved several benchmarks for Colorado communities. From fiscally sponsoring the Alpine Achievers Initiative, an integral organization that prepares youth in the San Luis Valley with academic and outdoor skills; to championing the Evergreen Walk for Wilderness, to establishing baseline conditions for wilderness management in over 35 wilderness areas.
Goals
The goals of the Society's community of practice are to:
We are a leading national organization dedicated to developing and implementing the gold standard of wilderness and natural resource management across the United States. Our mission is to promote excellence in the professional practice of wilderness stewardship, science, and education to ensure the life-sustaining benefits of wilderness.
Our vision is that stewards of the National Wilderness Preservation System have the professional abilities and resources to ensure that the values and benefits of wilderness are understood, treasured, and preserved by all people. We serve the federal public land management agency wilderness personnel and all non-profit staff and volunteers who provide stewardship services on federally designated wilderness lands.
Over the last five years, SWS continues to grow it's annual budget from $750,000 to over $1,400,000. 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 build strategic relationships across the country by first identifying key partners and then meeting with them to ask what support they need from us. In light of the substantial changes to land management agencies to date, we continue to convene practitioners across the country to identify and adjust our programs to meet the needs of the wilderness community.
From those discussions, we build and adapt our programs to deliver our mission and what our community is looking for. That is where our three core programs (Wilderness Fellows & Dayens, NWW, and Training and Education) came from. All of those programs are self-sustaining, earned-income programs. 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 and 2025 government shutdown and grant funding pause. We continue to expand our mission delivery from a strong foundation. Learn more about our programs in the program section of this platform.
Organization name
Society for Wilderness Stewardship
other names
SWS, Alliance for Wilderness Education and Stewardship
2005
Tax id (EIN)
20-2591129
Category
Environment
Organization Size
Medium Organization
Address
PO Box 17272Grand County, CO, US
Phone
970-761-9453
Other
406-212-5464