The Montana land trust community extends congratulations to Michael Whitfield, a longtime conservation champion and former executive director of the Heart of the Rockies Initiative for receiving the distinguished Kingsbury Browne Conservation Leadership Award on Oct. 11 at Rally. From the Land Trust Alliance blog: “At a time when many land trusts in the West were really asking the question, ‘Should we be working on community-based conservation or should we be focused on landscape-level conservation,’ Michael was one of the first people answering that question with, ‘Both. We should be doing both things,'” said Wendy Ninteman, the Land Trust Alliance’s Western director. “That passion and that commitment and that integrity are really contagious.” Whitfield will serve in the Kingsbury Browne Fellowship at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy for 2018-2019. For the fellowship, Whitfield will engage in research, writing and mentoring with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think tank devoted to land policy that’s based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now retired, Whitfield long served as executive director at Teton Regional Land Trust in Idaho before coordinating the Heart of the Rockies Initiative to expedite private land conservation in the West. “The collaborative planning effort, capacity building and capital fundraising for the Heart of the Rockies Initiative brought together land trusts in three states and two Canadian provinces in the Northern Rockies,” said Andrew Bowman, the Land Trust Alliance’s president. “Congratulations, Michael, and thank you for everything you’ve done for our community.”
