Hopkinton Land Trust Conservation Stewardship Endowment

At a meeting last fall of The Nature Conservancy, Edward Wood learned of the establishment of the Conservation Stewardship Collaborative (CSC) Endowment at The Rhode Island Foundation and the resulting challenge match issued by an anonymous donor. “During the meeting,” explains the Conservancy board member, “I started doodling some ideas and realized there was a real opportunity to leverage small donations into a significant amount of money. By the end of the meeting, I knew I wanted to do something for the Hopkinton Land Trust. It just clicked with me.”

The “something” the Hopkinton Land Trust member and his wife, Linda, did was make a contribution through their private foundation, the Brightman Hill Charitable Fund, to the CSC endowment. They directed that the match be used to establish this fund for the stewardship of land owned or managed by the Hopkinton Land Trust.

At the same time, the couple issued a challenge of their own: their foundation will match qualified gifts to the CSC for which the donor has designated Hopkinton Land Trust for the CSC challenge match. The Wood’s match will be made to the CSC and they will designate Hopkinton Land Trust as recipient of the CSC match. With this series of matches, a donor’s original gift is multiplied four-fold.

“I thought it was a good way to leverage foundation money. I’m thinking foundation stuff all the time and leveraging funds is always on my mind,” says Wood, who currently works as special advisor to the chairman of the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative.

Wood earlier held numerous positions in Rhode Island, including five years as director of the Department of Environmental Management. “The land trust movement is very important across the country and especially in Rhode Island. And in Hopkinton, people long have been concerned with retaining forests and open space.”

Speaking of the Borderlands project on the Rhode Island/Connecticut border, he notes proudly, “We (Hopkinton) are part of the largest continuous area of forested land between Boston and Washington, DC.”