Earlier this month, The Trustees concluded a five-year fundraising campaign to address the great environmental challenges of our day and build a foundation for the organization’s future. Established in support of The Trustees’ five-year strategic plan, entitled Momentum, the campaign raised more than $206 million, becoming the largest fundraising campaign in the history of The Trustees.

Thanks to the generosity of the campaign’s supporters, including hundreds of Founders Circle members, we launched groundbreaking coastal restoration projects, acquired thousands of acres of open space, created scores of new outdoor programs and events for children, and so much more.

We are sincerely thankful to supporters like you who made these transformative projects possible. Your leadership as a Founders Circle member not only created new opportunities for conservation and public enjoyment, it also placed The Trustees in a position to visualize our future with even greater imagination and courage.

The campaign’s goals and accomplishments are broken down by five strategic pillars: Protect the Places People Love, Respond to a Changing Coast, Elevate our Cultural and Agricultural Experiences, Invite the Next Generation Outside, and Build The Trustees of The Future.

The following are just a few of our accomplishments in those areas during the campaign.

Protect the Places People Love

• Through Momentum, we protected seven new properties and thousands of acres of land in communities as dense as Boston and as lush as the Berkshires, surpassing our campaign goal of opening four new reservations. The new reservations are Gerry Island, deCordova Sculpture Park & Museum, The Brickyard, Jewell Hill, Mary Cummings Park, Armstrong-Kelley Park, and Becket Historic Quarry & Forest.
• We acquired the central 66-acre parcel at Moraine Farm in Beverly, a country estate designed by the father of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted. The land also connects the four disparate plots The Trustees already owned on the property, allowing us to reunite and restore this historic Olmsted-designed masterpiece.
• We completed a multi-year landscape restoration project replacing trees and reinforcing the integrity of the Olmsted-designed carriage roads at World’s End in Hingham. Additionally, we opened the brand-new Wakeman O’Donnell Center in 2022, a first-class engagement space offering educational opportunities and hands-on environmental programming for visitors of all ages.

Respond to a Changing Coast

• The Boston Waterfront Initiative, One Waterfront, grew exponentially during the Momentum campaign. This includes the ongoing work to build Piers Park III—which will create a brand new park on an abandoned pier in East Boston, providing inclusive, resilient, and iconic open space to the public.
• We launched an annual State of the Coast report series, investigating the climate change threats and mitigation strategies for communities up and down the Massachusetts coast. The inaugural 2020 report took a detailed look at the North Shore, while the 2021 report centered on Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Elizabeth Islands, and the 2022 report focused on the South Coast.
• The Trustees is using an innovative ditch remediation method to naturally heal and restore the North Shore’s Great Marsh. The restoration work, which began in 2020, currently encompasses over 1,200 acres in Newbury, Essex, and Ipswich, making this the largest coastal or ecological restoration project in the history of The Trustees.

Elevate Our Cultural and Agricultural Experiences

• We completed multi-year transformations of Stevens-Coolidge House & Gardens and Long Hill that revitalized the public gardens, created new horticultural buildings, and constructed new visitor welcome centers.
• We increased our agricultural offerings, including creating a state-of-the-art teaching kitchen at The FARM Institute on Martha’s Vineyard, and expanded the Trustees Mobile Market, which brings high-quality and affordable locally grown produce from Trustees farms to underserved communities in Greater Boston.
• We greatly expanded our arts and culture offerings across the state, including at deCordova Sculpture Park & Museum in Lincoln, which integrated with The Trustees in 2019. Since then, deCordova has seen a dramatic increase in visitation while continuing to showcase acclaimed artists and advance diverse perspectives.

Invite the Next Generation Outside

• During Momentum we opened four new summer day camps—at Powisset and Chestnut Hill Farms, Rocky Woods, and deCordova Sculpture Park & Museum—and expanded overnight camping facilities at Dunes’ Edge Campground and Rocky Woods.
• We hired our first Director of Outdoor Experiences, who will work to advance outdoor recreation opportunities and enterprises, including both large and small adventure playscape opportunities at numerous properties. The centerpiece of this work will be a best-in-class nature play trail to be built at Copicut Woods in Fall River.
• In 2020 we launched the Island Education Initiative, offering school-aged youth on Martha’s Vineyard a unique environmental educational experience, continuing and expanding the work of the Claire Saltonstall Education Program. In its first two years, the program reached more than 1,500 students and teachers, engaging students at every Trustees property on Martha’s Vineyard.

Build The Trustees of the Future

• During Momentum, The Trustees developed a Diversity, Belonging, Inclusion, and Equity Roadmap, which provides an overarching vision for creating inclusive spaces of belonging for Trustees staff, members, volunteers, and visitors.
• The Trustees made a multi-million investment in its technology infrastructure, updating and modernizing equipment to ensure the future success of the organization. This included a timed ticketing system for accessing properties, which was critical at the onset of the pandemic, as well as the launch of a new, redesigned website.
• Following the January 2021 passing of Barbara Erickson, the president and CEO of The Trustees since 2012, The Trustees created the Barbara Erickson Land Conservation Fund to honor Barbara and her extraordinary legacy. The fund is the organization’s first internal source of funding dedicated solely to the creation of new reservations. It raised more than $28 million dollars from 230 donors during the Momentum campaign.