Sudbury Valley Trustees (SVT) is a regional open space land trust headquartered at Wolbach Farm in Sudbury, Massachusetts.
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Mission
Sudbury Valley Trustees is a regional land trust that conserves land and protects wildlife habitat in the Concord, Assabet, and Sudbury river basin for the benefit of present and future generations.
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About SVT
SVT is a member-supported, 501(c)3 non-profit organization that works in a 36-community region between Boston and Worcester, Massachusetts. We accomplish our work through an active, community-based 17-member Board of Directors, 11 staff members, 3 MassLIFT-AmeriCorps members, and over 200 volunteers. In 2013, SVT was accredited by the Land Trust Accreditation Commission.
We care for some of this region's most important forests, wetlands, and grasslands--natural areas that support wildlife habitat, working farms, and recreational trails. As of 2017, SVT cares for more than 4800 acres on 89 reservations and 75 Conservation Restrictions and maintains more than 55 miles of trails. We collaborate with numerous partner organizations, and our work is supported by 2900 members and 200 volunteers.
SVT has taken a significant leadership role that has been instrumental in preserving additional lands now under the permanent protection of public agencies, including the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. SVT reservations include trails for walking, bird watching, cross-country skiing and horseback riding. Those properties are open to the public free of charge.
History
SVT was founded in 1953. Upon returning to Wayland, Massachusetts after serving in the Marine Corps during World War II and the Korean War, Allen Morgan saw that the land he remembered being forest and farm as a child was rapidly being turned into homes and shopping malls. Realizing that the open spaces would be lost forever unless action was taken, he gathered together six friends (B. Allen Benjamin, Dr. George K. Lewis, Henry Parker, Willis B. Ryder, Richard Stackpole, and Roger P. Stokey) and founded Sudbury Valley Trustees to protect the natural resources of the area "on the theory that if we sat back and did nothing, certainly nothing would happen, and if we tried, maybe something would happen."
They mailed a form letter inviting people to become members for a fee of $3.00. SVT grew to a couple hundred members within a year or two. SVT publications emphasizing the importance of flood plain marshes led to the first flood plain zoning in the northeast. Thanks to SVT advocacy, most of the towns in the Sudbury Valley had established flood plain zones that protected upwards of 6,000 acres (24 km2) without having to spend dollars to acquire them.
SVT was an organization run purely through the efforts of volunteers until Morgan became SVT's first Executive Director in 1981. Morgan shepherded SVT's growth to a membership of just under 2,400, a staff of four full-time and four part-time employees, and nearly 60 parcels of land comprising nearly 1,200 acres (4.9 km2) of land preserved by the time of his death in 1990.
References
External links
- Sudbury Valley Trustees website (Sudbury, Massachusetts)
- The Land Trust Alliance website
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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