The Challenge of Growth, the Necessity of Stewardship,
and the Endowment Fund Remedy
The Arc of Appalachia is passionate about its mission, and so are its donors. A common question we receive from our supporters is, “Where do you need help the most?” Here we will explain in detail what it takes for us to buy and acquire land, and how we partner with supporters to turn our shared commitment to the land into lasting legacies.
The process of buying and protecting wildlands rests on three fiscal legs of direct support:
Buying the land outright – sale price and closing costs
Land Facilitation - Staff members who negotiate property sales, prepare closing papers including title & appraisal, write grants, and implement fundraising campaigns
Stewardship - caring for the newly acquired lands in perpetuity
If you are a gardener, you know that growth depends on a plant having all of its needs met. The lack of even one trace mineral can cause the entire growth process to stall, even if everything else the plant needs is abundant. The Arc of Appalachia is no different. No matter how much money we attract for land acquisition (the easiest leg to fund), if we fail to support the expert staff needed to buy the lands, the well-trained Land Stewards to care for the lands in perpetuity, or office managers who perform bookkeeping and donation processing, then we have no other choice than to watch high-quality land opportunities pass us by, which is understandably painful. This is NOT our dream!
We want to flourish and grow, and we want to grow quickly. Time is running out for our wildlands. We want to provide expanded protection for our natural communities, and we want to do this work as long as we can. In our minds, this is what putting love for the planet into action looks like.
Land Buying 101.
Here is more information on the three key components of our land preservation efforts.
Essential Ingredient #1 - Buying the Land
Raising money to buy land outright is a straightforward process, and it holds the greatest appeal for most donors. In addition to our donors, here in Ohio, we utilize two generous public funding opportunities: the Clean Ohio Grant Program and WRRSP, the Water Resource Restoration Sponsor Program, the latter administered by the Ohio EPA. Whenever the Arc is awarded funds from one of these sources, which is often, we can match every private donor dollar with three or more public dollars. There is no guarantee that these funding sources will last forever, of course, but while they exist, we aim to utilize them to the fullest extent possible.
Late in 2024, the Arc of Appalachia expanded its preservation canvas to West Virginia. Just a few months later, we acquired our first property in eastern Kentucky. Because there are few grants available in these two states, expanding in these regions relies almost entirely on private donations. Fortunately, the land prices in WV and KY can be a quarter to a third of the land prices in Appalachian Ohio, enabling us to effectively stretch our donor dollars regardless of where we work.
Essential Ingredient #2 - Land-Buying Facilitation
Selecting premier properties with the most intact natural communities, negotiating sale prices, ordering title searches and appraisals, writing grants and management plans, raising private funds, and completing closing paperwork are all land-buying facilitation tasks. These tasks are performed by a small number of highly competent staff, currently comprised of one full-time and two part-time employees.
Both large and small parcels are critical components of the jigsaw puzzles that create large blocks of protected land. The more developed the region, the smaller the puzzle pieces. The Highlands Nature Sanctuary, for instance, required 77 separate acquisitions over thirty years to reach its present size of 3000 acres. Its average acquisition was only 35 acres. Being mostly personnel, our land facilitation expenses remain relatively constant year after year. But because the size of parcels listed for sale is driven by chance, and because it takes the same effort to write a grant for 50 acres as it does for 500, the total number of acres the Arc of Appalachia pursues in any one year varies dramatically. And yet, we need all parcel sizes to build a contiguous preserve.
Land-buying facilitation expenses account for only a small fraction of the total land-buying cost, averaging only 4 - 6 cents for every dollar spent at the closing table. Here in Ohio, one full-time grant writer, supported in the Arc’s team environment, can write one to four million dollars of public funding in Ohio each year. This makes the cost of supporting Arc Land Facilitators an incredibly effective investment.
Essential Ingredient #3 - Land Stewardship
When the Arc of Appalachia was founded back in 1995, we thought all we had to do was buy back the land, set it aside, and move on to the next project. Since then, we’ve learned through real-life experiences that a parcel of land is never saved just once. The preservation act must, in actuality, be repeated over and over again – essentially forever.
Land Stewardship Managers perform these preservation tasks, doing all the things you would expect them to do. They remove literally tons of non-native invasive plants. They clean up old homesite trash dumps, maintain over 80 miles of hiking trails, build new trails, mow trailheads, trim trailheads weekly in the growing season, and mow grassland habitats in the winter. They cultivate three critical and tightly knit volunteer groups: Arc Trailblazers, ForestKeepers, and our Deer Management Hunters, organizing chat groups and volunteer workdays.
Land Stewardship Managers also do things you might not expect. They are frequently summoned to preserve areas to resolve boundary issues with neighboring landowners and loggers. They meet with utility companies to coordinate vegetation control, and at times, to avert eminent domain. They monitor conservation easements and write up the required annual reports. They steward Arc-owned waterways and alert the EPA and neighboring businesses when sediment loads suddenly appear in our streams. They run up and down nearly vertical hillsides to treat the deadly hemlock adelgids. They plant trees in abandoned farm fields bordering riparian corridors. They track ginseng poachers and fence out ATV trespassers, and they maintain the Arc’s fleet of pick-up trucks, tractors, trailers, mowers, and spray rigs that are invaluable to their work.
Today, five Arc Stewardship Team members – one supervisor and four regional managers in the field – care for the Arc’s extensive land holdings, each manager with thousands of acres under his care. One Land Stewardship Manager, working solo out of a well-stocked equipment center, can manage roughly eight preserves with public hiking trails, several more conservation easements, and six or more Arc preserves that are not open to the public. That same manager also cultivates 50-100 volunteers.
As the Arc grows in acres with each passing year, we must similarly grow our stewardship staff, equipment hubs, and internal infrastructure. Unlike land facilitation, which is a one-time investment, land stewardship expenses are annual, perpetual, substantial in scale, and constantly increasing, hence the funding challenge.
Stewardship is the most underfunded “leg” of the Arc’s three-footed pot - the most limited nutrient that we need for growth. The only reasonable remedy to the stewardship challenge is to build up endowment funds for stewardship support.
Growing in Capacity = Growing in Endowments
When nonprofits are constrained to raise money for operations each year, they and their donors are inevitably distracted from concentrating on the organization’s tangible mission. The Arc of Appalachia’s current Stewardship expenses, for instance, amount to roughly $513,000 a year, representing a significant portion of our payroll. If the Arc had to fundraise for stewardship each year, alongside seeking funds for land acquisition, it is easy to anticipate a sluggish campaign.
That is why every mature, successful nonprofit eventually leans on strong endowment funds. Endowment funds are managed by nonprofit Foundations and are invested in the market. Part of the annual income produced is reinvested to expand the fund’s principal. The remainder of the income is distributed to the nonprofit to further its mission, typically at an annual rate of 4% or 5%.
Our goal, of course, is to be self-sustaining in not just stewardship, but in ALL of our operations. Land facilitators and land stewardship personnel do not accomplish their good deeds in a vacuum. Supporting them are bookkeepers, donation processors, and administrators. The Arc of Appalachia also funds a vibrant nature-literacy education program, which is, in turn, supported by the overnight lodges so essential for education in our rural location. On the day we can achieve operational sustainability, then every donor dollar can be allocated to land acquisition and growth. Imagine that! Now that’s a goal worth working for!
The Arc of Appalachia has initiated endowment funds at several foundations across Ohio in our quest to achieve operational sustainability. We refer to them collectively as our Stewardship Forever Funds.
To achieve full sustainability at today’s operating level would require an investment of roughly 65 cents per acquisition dollar, or a balance of $21,500,000 in our endowment funds. Naturally, that figure will increase as we continue to grow, especially given the rapid expansion we have experienced lately. Taking our forecasted growth into consideration, we are aiming for an investment of 95 cents per acquisition dollar, or a $32,000,000 balance in our endowment funds
At this higher level of sustainability, we could support a second grant writer, establish two new regional stewardship hubs with equipment and staffing (projected for Gallia County and West Virginia), and hire a full-time conservation easement coordinator to help meet the exploding demand of private landowners to preserve their properties. This is a prudent goal and one worth working for.
The balance of all our endowment funds currently stands at $8,567,785, supporting 40% of our operations. The largest share of our endowment gifts comes to us as bequests, and we have many generous bequests waiting in the wings. What this bequest’s cumulative value may be, we do not know for sure, but we suspect it will double our base over time.
Back to the question, “What do we need the most?” Answer: We need to build up our endowment funds! Here are three ways you can assist:
Next time you make a donation, consider directing 50% of it to our Stewardship Forever Fund. Unless you direct it otherwise, we will transfer 50% of your donation to the Columbus Foundation’s Arc of Appalachia Endowment Fund.
Consider making a donation directly to the Arc of Appalachia Endowment Fund at the Columbus Foundation. See instructions for obtaining a gift-giving guide below.
We invite you to consider a bequest to one of the Arc’s Endowment Funds when planning your estate. Write to us at arcpreserveinfo@gmail.com and ask us to email you “Options for Directing a Gift to the Arc of Appalachia” to receive details.
The table below contains lists all of our Stewardship Forever Funds:
