Trust for Public Land

From dKosopedia

The Trust for Public Land (TPL) is a national, nonprofit, land conservation organization that conserves land for people to enjoy as parks, community gardens, historic sites, rural lands, and other natural places, ensuring livable communities for generations to come. [1]

Since its founding in 1972, the San Francisco-based Trust for Public Land has helped conserve more than two million acres of land in 3,000 separate projects across the U.S. Working out of six regional offices and in most of the fifty states, TPL leverages donor dollars and other available funding sources to help communities purchase land and transfer it into public hands, everything from national parks expansion to greenways to historic sites to urban pocket parks. It also uses a quiver of real estate tools—conservation easements, deed restrictions—to permanently protect farmlands, view planes and watersheds. “We’re very skilled at how to make the most difficult real estate transactions work,” says Scott Parker, who set up TPL’s Hawai‘i office in 1998 and is now TPL’s national director of project training. “We think and act like a private developer, except we un-develop.” [2]

Hawaiian Islands Program

From an article entitled The Third Way in Hana Hou! magazine, author Curt Sanburn writes of TPL:

Between them, Parker, (Joshua) Stanbro and Stanbro’s predecessor, Teresa McHugh, have signed off on eleven land conservation projects in the Islands, totaling 2,098 acres. These include the expansion of O‘ahu’s Ka‘ala Farm, a community-sponsored cultural learning center on the Wai‘anae coast; expansions of Volcanoes National Park and Pu‘uhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park on the Big Island, and Haleakala National Park on Maui; creation of the seventy-seven-acre Waiahole Beach Park on the shores of O‘ahu’s Kane‘ohe Bay; and protection of historic seventy-acre Mu‘olea Point at Hana on Maui and of Lumaha‘i Beach on Kaua‘i. [3]

Lea Ok Soon Hong is the new director of the Trust for Public Land's Hawaiian Islands Program, appointed on Aug. 21, 2006. [4] Joshua Stanbro is the Hawaiian Islands project manager for the Trust for Public Land.