Expanding Our Reach into the Community
Last November I had the deeply rewarding experience of joining what must have been 150 or more people at the grand opening of the Circle Creek Conservation Center, NCLC’s new home. Our staff was there, and many of our volunteers, and along with them, community members—some of them friends I hadn’t seen in years, and many I’d never met—who came to see the building or just to find out what NCLC is all about. The mission of NCLC attracts such interesting and caring people! The conversation and laughter flowed, and the food was, as it always is at our events, great.
At one point I stepped away from the hubbub and looked out those floor-to-ceiling windows at the trees: the ancient spruce forest spilling off Tillamook Head to the west, and to the north, the now-tall grove of spruces and redcedars we’ve planted over the past 20 years, as part of our effort to turn this pasture—once a floodplain forest—back into a native rainforest. It struck me: Growing trees is what this country does best, left to itself. And that’s what NCLC does best: give the land the chance to follow its own natural trajectory, and if the land has been developed for human use of one kind or another and has the opportunity to abandon that trajectory, help free it to be what it was meant to be.
I couldn’t be prouder to be part of that process.
“NCLC is so positive: in what it accomplishes and in how it works, always with an eye to benefiting plants and animals and people. It is a solace and an honor to be involved in this organization.”
NCLC doesn’t exist to build buildings, which is why it took us 12 years to rebuild after our first office burned down. In those years when we worked out of rented headquarters, we had more important things to focus on: protecting and connecting and promoting the health of lands from the 3-acre Necanicum Estuary Habitat Reserve in the heart of Seaside to the epic Rainforest Reserve.
Taking on stewardship of Cape Falcon Marine Reserve and expanding the land-to-sea connectivity on Oregon’s North Coast. And so much more. But as community support allowed our staff to grow to meet all these responsibilities, we flat ran out of room. The new building lets us do even more, and more effectively. Staff have room to safely store their equipment, room to work privately and to confer with their colleagues. And to grow as a land trust, as opportunities present themselves and as our supporters ask us to take them on.
As we expand what we can accomplish in a right-sized facility, we’re also expanding our reach into the community, with an enlarged board of directors to better represent the ever-growing diversity of Oregon’s coastal community. The image that comes to my mind is of a flower bud: tightly furled and beautiful in its own way, and promising even more beauty as it unfolds and matures.
NCLC is so positive: in what it accomplishes and in how it works, always with an eye to benefiting plants and animals and people. It is a solace and an honor to be involved in this organization.
Betsy Ayres
President, Board of Directors
North Coast Land Conservancy