My organization, The Wilderness Center, is a nature center and land trust. However, over the last several years we have added another dimension to our mission: ecopreneurialsim.
While are educational offerings have remained strong, and our land conservation efforts have grown, we took on a few exciting new ecopreneurial efforts. 1. Wetland Mitigation. We discovered that we could earn income by preserving, restoring or enhancing wetlands. This has been a success financially and its conservation value is incredible!
2. We started TWC Consulting Forestry. This came slowly as a result of many of our members and supporters who owned land approaching me to mark trees on their land for sale. As a plant ecologist, I could do an okay job of making trees in a sustainable way, but there are many aspects of full service forestry that I could not offer. After much discussion, we hired a forester to provide those services. He is charged with working within the highest ethical standards. As a conservation organization we realized that good sustainable forestry practices would have a big mission payoff in wildlife habitat, water quality, and even carbon sequestration.
3. Foxfield Preserve: The Wilderness Center started the first nature preserve cemetery in Ohio. It remains the only nature preserve cemetery operated by a nonprofit conservation organization in the nation. The philosophy of Foxfield Preserve is that the land is a nature preserve first. Everything follows from that. It is not a lawn. Only natural burials (no concrete vault, no toxic embalming, only biodegradable caskets for shrouds) are permitted. This has been a wonderful effort. It is certainly positive from an environmental standpoint, but the spiritual benefits to the clients and their families is immeasurable.
4. Ecotourism: We continue to offer ecotours with the philosophy that these tours enhance the value of natural resources to local people.
Over the next several years the organization hopes to assemble a large tract or tracts of land to be run as sustainable forests on a nonprofit paradigm. Wish us luck in finding the opportunities!
The other interesting thing is the creation of "Wild Ideas...the Podcast." It has become one of the top nature podcasts in the world. It is a science-based nature chat podcast covering all of the natural sciences in a friendly approachable manner. It can be found on our website, iTunes, and most other podcast hosting websites. Since it's inception it has had high ratings on iTunes getting an average of five star reviews. There are about 200 episode available with a new episode posted every week. Each episode attracts thousands of downloads from all over the globe.
For me personally, I've been preparing The Wilderness Center for my retirement and managing a succession process that is just getting started.