UPEC Community Conservation Grants

Now accepting applications for the 2025 round of grants — deadline is January 11, 2025

 

 

UPEC’s Community Conservation Grant Program is designed to challenge UP communities to promote conservation values within their watershed or local area. The program honors the late Tom Church of Watersmeet, a long-time UPEC member whose bequest made this fund possible. The program is also supported by the Saari Family Fund and many individual donors.

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In the past short-sighted actions by corporate or individual landowners often degraded the UP landscape. Today, state and federal environmental programs as well as the private conservancy movement work to protect natural areas for public benefit and to safeguard significant populations of wildlife and the ecosystem processes that support them. UPEC’s Community Conservation Grants initiative focuses on communities that want to step up the protection of conservation values in their locality. 

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UPEC wishes to encourage more proactive stewardship with this program. Grants could be awarded for finding ways to enhance native plant and animal life and the systems that support them. They can be for starting a community forest or preserve, or restoring a stream or wetland, or putting on a program about local medicinal plants, rare frogs, or top predators. These are only examples; local communities can come up with their own ideas.  

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As of 2024, UPEC has given away $232,200 under this program: $30,000 in 2016 for land acquisition; $12,500 for various projects in 2017; $25,500 in 2018 for land acquisition; $21,500 in 2019 for land acquisition and educational campaigns; $32,000 in 2020 for land acquisitions and water monitoring; $36,700 in 2021 for various projects; $32,000 in 2022 for land acquisition, river protection, and ecosystem restoration;  $19,000 in 2023 for land acquisition/public access assurance and Native land rematriation; and $23,000 in 2024 for land acquisition. Our priority has been to further the permanent acquisition of ecologically rich parcels of land with an eye to community support and vulnerability to loss.

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The grants, up to $10,000 each, are for planning or implementing local conservation projects that engage a variety of stakeholders within a community, from recreational and sportsmen’s groups to naturalists, township officials, churches, and schools. The UPEC Board anticipates the program will stimulate grassroots conservation activity in localities throughout the UP.

 

Community Conservation Grant FAQs

• WHO? Conservation activists inspired to step up the practice of conservation values within a community are the target. Applicants must have 501(c)3 status, and the project must take place in the UP.

• WHY? Despite extensive public land in the UP, land in private ownership (corporations and individuals) offers new opportunities to enhance protection through community action. Degraded landscapes can be restored, and good ones protected from development by creative use of tools such as conservation easements and by educational campaigns.

• WHAT? Grants may be used as a local match to purchase land, but other purposes related to a community land initiative are also suitable, such as educational videos, legal expenses, or wildlife inventories. A detailed budget is expected, as well as a final report on how the money was actually spent. Grants may not be used for salaries.

• HOW MUCH? Grant awards have varied from $1,500 to $10,000, depending on the likelihood of the award to contribute permanently to conservation values in a community. Will the grant have a lasting impact? Are diverse community stakeholders engaged? Motivated activists and strong groups are the keys to long-range protection.

• WHEN do I need to apply? Applications for the 2025 round of grants are being accepted through January 11, 2025. Apply below.

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