Our Values | Unique Places to Save | 501c3 Conservation Land Trust

Welcome!

Unique Places to Save is a team of mission-driven professionals that conserve natural and working lands and water resources. Our Board of Directors is composed of business owners and individuals with experience across industries from real estate development and environmental consulting to software startups.

Together, we bring a solutions-oriented approach towards ensuring a future with clean water, healthy working lands, and vibrant natural areas.

As Executive Director, it is my privilege to help implement this vision. Working alongside our dedicated project partners and landowners, we have permanently conserved over:

130 miles of restored streams
Thousands of acres of natural areas

Our work is geographically diverse, but our mission unites all that we do.

Unique Places to Save effectuates change by doing conservation a little differently than most organizations:

We value our partners by understanding their challenges and finding where our mutual goals align to maximize conservation outcomes.
Many of our project sites have been restored from a damaged or degraded state, resulting in a double benefit of measurable ecological uplift and perpetual land conservation.
We work in multiple states on varied landscapes and embrace the challenges that conserving unique places brings.

Please join us in growing our legacy of positive impact. We would be excited to work with you and look forward to being your conservation partner.

Sincerely,
Christine

Conserve

These projects include a legally-binding conservation agreement that protects land, aquatic, and natural resource conservation values in perpetuity.

Restore

These projects include activities that improve resilience through the recovery of native communities and ecological functions in aquatic and terrestrial systems that have been degraded, damaged, or destroyed.

Habitat

These projects protect high-priority habitat for at-risk, state, and/or federally-listed rare, threatened, or endangered species.

Access

These projects include public access or support environmental and conservation education and/or research.

Working

These projects include the permanent protection of working lands that are often intertwined with other aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.

Connecting Mission & Impact

At the core of every project, Unique Places to Save serves to meet its mission of restoring and conserving high-quality land and aquatic resources. We can have the greatest influence on the future by working in the places with the highest positive impacts on aquatic systems from the headwaters of streams in the mountains; to farmland fronting river corridors, to wetlands along the coast.

While our mission is central to what we do and ties all of our work together, how we meet our mission is a little more complex. Therefore, we have created a fun way to simplify the complexity and acknowledge the achievements of our projects.

Each project we complete earns a badge with our water drop logo in the center, representing our mission. Surrounding the water drop are additional positive impacts that a project can achieve depending on how we are meeting our mission for that particular project. These five positive impacts represent specific project accomplishments and include Conserve, Restore, Habitat, Working, and Access.

Every Unique Places to Save project can achieve each of these positive impacts. How many impacts will your next project with us achieve?

Restore and Conserve Land & Water

The mission of Unique Places to Save is to restore and conserve high-quality land and aquatic resources. We directly restore and conserve natural and working lands and aquatic resources through conservation protections and sustainable land, aquatic, and natural resource restoration and management.

Where We Apply This Goal

Restoration
Conservation
Habitat Improvement
Public Access
Working Lands

Operate with Permanence & Sustainability

Our work includes perpetual responsibilities to our constituents, supporters and partners. Therefore, it is our goal to create an organizational structure that emphasizes the permanence and health of our finances, operations, and reputation. This requires us to implement sustainable and adaptable strategies for long-term organizational success.

Where We Apply This Goal

Financial
Operations
Reputation
Stewardship
Resilience

Lead through Innovation & Science

As we continue to work in our industry, we search for ways to improve our effectiveness. A key factor in being able to innovate is to utilize the best available science and decision-making processes to analyze what are thought to be established ideas, concepts, and processes from an independent perspective. By doing this, we can provide an objective critique of information and processes resulting in potential increases in efficiency and effectiveness.

How We Apply This Goal

Expertise
Consistency
Efficiency
Curiosity
Innovation

Science is the foundation of our decisions and actions.

Where we work and how we work is first and foremost informed by science. Each natural community has different needs and approaches, which all fall within a greater landscape that interacts with human needs and uses.

Innovation inspires, drives, and motivates our work on solutions within and beyond the organization.

Solving complex issues with comprehensive solutions fuels our success and amplifies our impact. This motivation drives us to excel and fosters collaboration and leadership, helping us address outdated thinking and changing regulations. Together, we aim to achieve more sustainable positive impacts, inspire one another, fulfill our organizational mission, and share the benefits of our work with others.

Restoration of aquatic and terrestrial resources is a viable approach towards regaining natural functions of degraded ecosystems.

The stress that human land use has placed on our planet is undeniable. By restoring land, rivers, wetlands, and other critical natural resources, we help boost biodiversity and ecological resilience today, while working towards the greater goal of ensuring a healthy balance between our communities and our environment.

Conservation of working lands and ecosystems supports current and future communities.

Protecting high quality aquatic systems along with working lands and other land areas is critical for healthy and sustainable communities. Perpetual conservation ensures our natural and working land resource base is available for future generations.

Collaboration is critical to ensure lasting conservation.

Working in isolation is typically counterproductive. Just as the land and water we restore and conserve have a place within a larger landscape, our organization and our work must also fit within a larger framework of stakeholders, partners, and the public. Only through an understanding of where our goals and priorities align can we achieve a more sustainable impact.

Confidence to lead in the face of difficulty and uncertainty creates success.

Our world is ever-changing and becoming more complex and difficult to navigate. We embrace these uncertainties and adapt to meet the world’s challenges. We do not turn away from difficulties, but instead treat them as complexities that need solutions and we see ourselves as part of those solutions.

Permanence of our organization is necessary to achieve our goals.

It is imperative that we operate in a manner that is financially and environmentally sustainable in the long term. Ensuring the longevity and efficacy of our organization requires careful planning, resource management, and partnerships that provide ongoing support and adaptation to changing conditions.

Our Unique Values