“People who were homeschooling their children were losing ways to connect with nature, especially when state parks and beaches closed. They found their way to Westerly Land Trust because we kept our properties open…If that’s the one silver lining of Covid, I think we changed people’s lives for the better.”

Around 1998, Westerly Land Trust became an important conservation group. Because of who we are and where we’re located, we experience a lot of pressure to develop land. With home values increasing and the idea that farmland is being lost in the state at an alarming rate, the Land Trust’s vision and hope was to preserve land for the public’s use, and for farming and agriculture for future generations. The idea behind our work is that we want the public to be able to access it. We want farmers to be able to access the land, and we want to protect our water and land resources.

Looking at the big picture, we conserve 1,700 acres across 31 properties. Most of those properties are open to the public so people can access them for recreation and for communing with nature. When the world shut down in 2020, the land trust became really important to people for their mental and physical health. People who were homeschooling their children were losing ways to connect with nature, especially when state parks and beaches closed. They found their way to Westerly Land Trust because we kept our properties open, and we were still caring for the trails. Our visibility exploded at that time. If that’s the one silver lining of Covid and how our lives changed for the worse in so many ways, I think we changed people’s lives for the better.

The help we’ve received from funding has changed who we are and what we are to our community in a very powerful way. Our education program started in 2016, but when Covid happened, we found that we could be a safe space where children could gather in our outdoor classroom. We started a program called Living Laboratories, ran it all through Covid, and it’s still happening today.

Living Laboratories is our after-school program for kids from kindergarten through fourth grade. We developed a partnership with Westerly Public Schools, where after-school, students can take a free bus from their school to our nature preserves for a hands-on environmental lesson. Each session has a different theme: Sometimes it’ll be finding tadpoles in the river, or it’ll be learning about bees and agriculture. Our offices are situated on an 80-acre parcel where we have two working farms, which is great for the kids. The participation for this program has skyrocketed in the past few years, too. We’ve found that local families, especially working families, are looking for after-school opportunities. They don’t want their kids to be cooped up in the classroom all day, and instead want to give them an opportunity to get outside and explore nature. Some of the most beautiful moments during these sessions are when the kids will say something like, “I brought my family back here” or “I taught my family about how to compost”. The positive effects of this program are growing and multiplying, and it’s been great.

Because we are an environmental conservation organization, being able to deliver a science lesson for kids is something we know how to do. But the concept of social and emotional learning is important within education, especially that children have special social and emotional challenges at different levels. Covid exacerbated this for kids who may already be anxious, which was heartbreaking. But we recognized that these kinds of things are exactly what we need to focus on—and nature heals us.  

Part of our Living Laboratories program is surveying each student when they get off the bus. We’ll ask them: How are you feeling right now? Anxious? Sad? Hungry? Tired? Mad? They’ll identify how they feel, we carry on with the lesson, and then we give them the exact same survey right before they leave us. Inevitably, they feel better by the end of the session than when they first stepped off the bus. It may not be very scientific, but it is very heartwarming. It makes us feel like we’re doing the right thing. We’ve had great feedback from both schools and families. Organizations like ParsonsKellogg allow this program to go forward. It’s the fuel in our engines. We recognize that it is an incredible partnership and we wouldn't be able to grow in such a way without the support that we've been able to rely on.

While we’re not farmers ourselves, we do make this land available for farmers who can start their own businesses on our land and thrive. We’ve developed a whole campus for farmers who can run their own operations here. It’s especially important for us to make sure that the farming practices are organic, as kind to the land as we want them to be, and to make the land better. This also makes for a beautiful place to come to work.  

We also just completed our strategic plan for the next five years. Being a community partner is critically important to us: The idea that we are not just seen as an organization that is conserving land, but that we’re utilizing the land in a powerful way that affects people’s lives.

Right now, we are focusing on conserving what we can. We are not opposed to development. We want our community to be fed, housed and we want to make sure our community is healthy. We believe we can be a partner in that by working more closely with developers. For example, we just negotiated a deal with developers who are planning to build a housing development in a more urban area of Westerly, and they’ve agreed to donate 11 acres to the land trust that we will maintain. We’ll be able to put in walking trails. This means that every kid that will live in this housing complex will have an 11-acre park behind their backyard with trails, a stream and trees. This is our way of being able to affect growth in a positive way.

As told to Justine Baldwin