Preserving Wild California:

Protecting Our Heritage and Preparing for the Future

Preserving Wild California (PWC), a program of Resources Legacy Fund Foundation (RLFF), is a five-year, $150 million program designed to preserve California’s wild lands and rivers, and to ensure their permanent protection by investing in systematic acquisitions of land and fostering supportive policies, organizations, and constituencies.

We were entrusted by donors to develop a long-term comprehensive strategy that would maintain the character and value of protected wild lands and rivers while seeking to strengthen and expand protection of additional priority areas, ensuring that future generations will benefit from the value of crucial ecosystem services, as well as the important solace that California wild places provide. We designed PWC to create and catalyze innovative approaches; invest in organizations and efforts that could become models for success; address immediate as well as future needs and threats; support collaborative efforts to advance wild land protection; and build broad, sustainable constituencies and coalitions that span partisan, age, ethnic, geographic, and economic boundaries.

Since program inception in 2003, PWC has invested in land acquisition, education, communication, outreach, advocacy, building the internal capacities of local or regional nonprofit organizations, restoration and stewardship, planning, and policy work. Examples of strategies that are hallmarks of the program include:

Lasting Impact. The PWC program envisions success as protection of wild lands forever. Therefore, we measure success not just in the number of acres acquired, but also in strengthening public policies and increasing public funding to protect these lands, in fostering grass-roots support by investing in the capacity and tools of nonprofit organizations, and in broadening, educating, and engaging new constituencies in efforts to protect these wild lands and rivers well into the future.

Thoughtful Approach. The program takes a system-based approach toward preserving natural resource values. Through thoughtful initial research and analysis, the program identified priorities for potential land acquisition in seven regions of the state and provides grant and loan funds based on these priorities. Select, large tracts of untouched wild lands are the highest priority. However, PWC also recognizes value in other acquisitions which may, for example, provide wildlife corridors, where animals may move from one protected area to the next, often from winter to summer habitat. This access to diverse habitats, and possible linkage of high and low elevation areas, improves a species' chances for survival over the long-term.

Attending to Details. Nonprofit organizations use PWC funding to purchase lands surrounded by or adjacent to important park, wilderness, and roadless areas and wild rivers. These acquisitions are often small, scattered parcels, and by themselves do not receive attention or accolades. But these acquisitions are important to reduce public land management conflicts and costs, allow permanent protection, and protect the integrity of key public lands. Inconsistent and incompatible uses can threaten wild lands and rivers with mining or other extractive processes, water and land development, road building, trespass and encroachment for unauthorized purposes, and opposition to protection of the public land and resources. Investing the time to identify the highest priority acquisitions and to complete the transactions ensures better protection of the resource and recreational values of some of California’s treasured parks and landscapes.

Building Bridges. The PWC program seeks to fund activities that contribute to community understanding and engagement on issues affecting the local quality of life. Groups use project funds to offer fire safety training to homeowners and communities; develop information regarding the economic contribution of natural areas and resources on both the local and state levels; train scientists and advocates to better communicate important information; assemble data regarding the distribution, use patterns, and density of plants and animals; and provide information about how better to manage limited resources in the face of climate change.

The PWC program offers grants and loans and enters into contracts for land acquisition, planning, policy and advocacy, constituency building, nonprofit organizational capacity building, and stewardship and restoration. To find out more about criteria for receiving funding from the PWC program, please refer to For Grantees.

Photograph by Doug Steakley