PROVIDENCE — The Land Trust Alliance’s annual nationwide Rally is coming to Rhode Island later this month for the third time since 1985.

The four-day event (Sept. 25-28) at the Rhode Island Convention Center will feature workshops and seminars on land conservation topics, field trips, networking events, exhibits, and an awards presentation celebrating conservation leadership.

It kicks off with an Indigenous Land Conservation Summit — a gathering of Indigenous leaders and other stakeholders to build relationships and share knowledge about human relationships with nature and responsible stewardship.  

The National Land Conservation Conference, better known as the Rally, is a “gathering of inspired and passionate land conservation practitioners from around the world who are dedicated to conserving cherished places in our communities,” according to organizers.

Last year’s 36th annual Rally was held in Portland, Ore., and attracted nearly 2,500 participants. With a high density of land trusts in New England — Rhode Island alone has 53 — organizers are expecting a similar turnout this year.

Speakers include Providence resident, author, and environmental justice advocate Kate Schapira; Ronda Lee Chapman, equity director for the Trust for Public Land; Leslie Jonas, a native of Cape Cod and Elder Eel Clan member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe; and Ángel Peña, executive director of the Nuestra Tierra Conservation Project.

Kate Sayles, executive director of the Rhode Island Land Trust Council, attended last year’s Rally in Portland, the 2022 event in New Orleans, and others online and in person.

“The Rally is really awesome,” she said. “I’ve come home every year with new connections and the latest best practice information on natural climate change solutions, equity in conservation, biodiversity, new methods of land conservation, farmland access, trail access, fundraising and development, the intersection of affordable housing, legal issues.”

The Washington, D.C.-based Land Trust Alliance (LTA), a national organization with a membership of some 950 land trusts, serves as an advocate on Capitol Hill for all matters related to land conservation. Its mission is “to save the places people love by strengthening land conservation across America.”

To do that, the LTA works in three ways: increase the pace of conservation, so more of the natural world is protected; enhance the quality of conservation, so the most important lands get protected; ensure the permanence of conservation by creating the laws and resources needed to defend protected land over time.

The LTA has also crafted a comprehensive set of standards and practices for land trusts that consists of 12 guiding principles.

Sayles said she and the Rhode Island Land Trust Council work closely with the LTA to coordinate with other state coalitions regionally, to share information about current trends, and to create and facilitate programming for Rhode Island’s network of land trusts.

In the early 1980s, a group of conservationists gathered at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Mass., and envisioned an organization that could support the growing number of land trusts emerging across the country.

The Land Trust Exchange was created months later and eventually became what is now the Land Trust Alliance. (Despite being born in Massachusetts, the LTA has never held a Rally in the Bay State. Hartford, Conn., hosted the 2010 Rally.)

“It was a group of 40 land trust practitioners and supporters that just kind of came together and realized that they were working on similar issues and there was a need for an organization that could unite land trusts,” said Corey Himrod, the LTA’s media relations manager. “It was this desire to just connect each other and then find ways to sort of help, help the the private land conservation organizations grow and support them.”

In the four decades since its creation, the LTA, according to Himrod, has helped U.S. land trusts collectively conserve 61 million acres — an area larger than all the land contained in America’s national parks. He said the plan is for LTA members to conserve another 60 million acres by 2030.

This conserved space provides wildlife habitat, stores and filters water, protects against flooding, sequesters carbon, helps mitigate the climate crisis, and grows food.

Note: The Rally was held virtually in 2020 and 2021, and there was no conference in 1986. Providence hosted in 2004, 2014, and this year.