Our values and Commitments
We commit to lead from and apply these values to all aspects of our work:
LOVE
Love of our shared home connects us. Love drives our work and provides its meaning and method. By showing up with love, we foster transformational relationships with and between our lands, waters, and communities, motivating action and change.
Connection
The place we serve is a crossroads of ecoregions and migrations, a network of waterways and niches, a diverse and abundant home. We affirm our connection to all who love, need, and honor these lands and waters — including past and future generations of our human and wild neighbors. We see these many connections as commitments to sustained compassionate right action, curiosity, and celebration.
Integrity
We courageously uphold our mission and vision. When we fight for the place we love, we fight in good faith. We communicate transparently. We hold ourselves accountable to our values and commitments, and welcome being held accountable when we fall short. We are honest about our diversity of opinions and perspectives, and strive to be humble in the imperfectness of our positions, practicing respect for all, even in conflict.
Justice
We aspire to treat all beings in a manner that is morally right and fair. Many past and present inequities have resulted in oppressive and extractive patterns among humans and between humans and the rest of the living world. We acknowledge that we — as a species, as individuals, and as an organization — have sometimes benefited from these inequities. We work to correct these imbalances and wrongs holistically, cultivating reciprocity and repair.
Resilience
While humans have impacted the integrity of ecosystems in our region (and everywhere on Earth), we retain our ability to learn, remember, and practice other ways of being. We can change — and we are living in a time of many changes. Change is natural and inevitable, hard, and full of possibility; it demands our courage and invites us to learn and adapt — and sometimes, to resist. The ecosystems and organisms we love (and upon which we depend) are always responding, sometimes in inspiring ways, to pressures, disruptions, and opportunities. As an organization, while we grieve losses and work to alleviate extractive impacts, we also trust and honor our home’s seed banks and wisdoms, its adaptive capacity: its resilience. We nurture the same resiliencies in ourselves that we admire, and try to safeguard, in our home place.
Efficacy
Our mission and vision are actionable, restorative and forward-looking, requiring us to seek tangible outcomes in our work. The ecosystems and wildlife we defend rely on our successes. With integrity, imagination, hard work and good strategy, we aim to deliver on what we set out to do.
Our commitment to Diversity, Equity and inclusion:
We commit to including voices in the conservation movement that have been excluded.
We nurture new and existing relationships, listen, learn, and adjust. We are curious and vulnerable. We work to widen our community by creating and sharing space for historically oppressed voices, and those most harmed by our planet’s ongoing degradation and depletion. We integrate this commitment into our day to day practices. We make mistakes, and aspire to learn from them. Deliberately, we use our privilege to create a more just world.