Small Grant Example Activities

$25K Management & Restoration Grants

• Implement ecosystem management and restoration activities that are intended to create or enhance habitat for target bird species and other wildlife, including those practices that benefit both human and wildlife interactions on the landscape collectively.
• Conduct bird monitoring before and after the land management or restoration work to assess impacts to bird and wildlife populations.
• Engage stewardship teams from land trusts to implement and monitor the effects of management when visiting fee owned and easement parcels.
• Create habitat management demonstration areas that support targeted bird populations and display different management techniques for birds as outreach and educational tools for land trust staff, conservation practitioners, and private landowners.
• Introduce partners to best practices and methods that can be implemented on their own lands and spread to the landowners with whom they work.
• Offer habitat assessments and voluntary conservation recommendations that give landowners flexible management options, as well as informing landowners of and providing guidance with incentive programs that will help achieve management goals.
• Create pilot projects from formal partnerships that are working collaboratively to address key challenges to landscape-scale conservation and restoration of habitat systems.
• Teach workshops about management techniques to educate and encourage additional land trusts and partners to manage lands for birds and prioritize lands for focal species and their associate species in your region.
• Build capacity and support broader efforts that influence habitat management strategies to directly grow and strengthen land trust conservation goals.

See these pages to read about past projects – Past Small Grant Awardee Projects (2017-2023 projects)

$10K Capacity & Partnership Grants 

• Build land trust capacity by teaching or demonstrating how birds can enhance strategic planning and mission fulfillment of land trusts.
• Build partners’ capacity for future work to enhance the biodiversity and productivity of bird habitats on private lands.
• Build partnerships and facilitate mutually beneficial collaborations with the bird conservation community that prioritize bird conservation within your service area and beyond and drive landscape-scale management and protection efforts.
• Build and conduct workshops that connect land trusts, partners, and landowners with birds and planning tools such as eBird to empower landowners and land trust staff to survey for birds on their private lands and create connections to the birding community.
• Develop a framework for implementation with land trust state associations, bird conservation groups, and partners to build capacity for your land trust and further promote bird conservation.
• Develop monitoring methodology and collect baseline data on birds to support your land trust’s stewardship requirements and integrate into future management plans.
• Engage community members through workshops and outreach events at a habitat demonstration site to educate about different management and restoration techniques.
• Pass along project ideas and lessons-learned to other land trusts by presenting a talk at a regional meeting, hosting a workshop, or presenting at the Land Trust Alliance Rally.
• Demonstrate the use of the Northeast Bird Habitat Conservation Initiative Mapping Tool for land trust activities such as land prioritization, parsing out what species are important on land trust holdings, where to improve habitat, increasing engagement, growing fundraising dollars, building grant support, etc.

See these pages to read about past projects: Past Small Grant Awardee Projects (2017-2024 projects).