BRCA Partners Gather to Explore Watershed Funding
A group of Blue Ridge Conservation Alliance partners will gather in Front Royal, Va., in April to explore collaborating on a range of federal and state grant applications. Increasingly, many funding programs are increasingly focused on “regional conservation partnerships.” RCPs take many forms, with the most successful ones pooling partner projects together under one grant proposal — rather than single-project proposals. The Shenandoah Valley Conservation Collaborative the Rappahannock River Roundtable in Virginia, and the Safe Water Conservation Collaborative in West Virginia, are three examples of successful regional parnterships..
A few of the programs partners will explore are Chesapeake Bay Bay Small Watershed and Innovative Nutrient and Sediment Reduction grants, and Chesapeake Watershed Investments for Landscape Defense (WILD). While the grants are primarily geared towards watershed improvement practices, Small Watershed grants allow for easement transaction costs, while WILD actually funds land protection. As much fun as it is to talk about big vision stuff, this ground-level stuff.
