Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary (2023) defines stewardship as “the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care.” In the land trust world, this refers to the activities that we undertake on an ongoing basis to physically care for the properties in our portfolio and to uphold the specific conservation values of each individual property for the public good.

With the last graduation ceremony at Cazenovia College completed, I, like many of you, have been thinking about what will transpire when the college officially closes its doors. The closing of the college and the re-purposing of the campus will have enormous impacts for our community. Many land trusts, especially those with extensive service areas, cannot or do not participate in planning at the community scale. CPF, on the other hand, has a long history of involvement in community-level planning, perhaps resulting from the organization’s early focus on preserving the historic village.

CPF completed an important project with Russ and Lisa Brownback to place conservation easements on both the 29-acre Meadows Estate on Rippleton Road as well as the 56-acre undeveloped property immediately to the south, recently purchased by the Brownbacks, and currently  grazed by the eye-catching herd owned by Albanese Longhorns. This project is uniquely important in that it addresses all three of the major facets of CPF's mission.

In 2021, CPF was awarded funding through The Nature Conservancy of New York’s Resilient and Connected Network (RCN) Planning, Capacity & Strategy Grant Program to update its 2012 Strategic Land Conservation Plan (SLCP) and bring Geographic Information Systems (GIS) capacity in-house. In 2022, CPF hired professional planner and Cazenovia resident, Jennifer Marotto Lutter, to complete the plan. The SLCP is intended to help CPF focus its conservation efforts and understand how best to prioritize property protection to achieve broad conservation goals.

When the property now known as the Burlingame Meadow was listed for sale in 2015, CPF launched a capital campaign, raising most of the funds needed to purchase the property to provide parking and permanent public access to the trails. Most of the purchase was made possible through generous gifts from neighbors and CPF Members and CPF financed the remainder with a small mortgage, which represents CPF’s only debt obligation today.