A New Generation of Leadership in the Land Trust Movement

Jean Hocker, who led the Land Trust Alliance through its early rapid growth, has deep perspective and insight into historic trends in the field land conservation in the private and non-profit sectors in the United States. As the recipient of the 2014 Kingsbury Browne Award from the Land Trust Alliance and a Kingsbury Browne Fellowship at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, she took several months to survey two generations of land trust leaders: the generation which emerged during the early years of the Land Trust Alliance and helped establish land trusts as a powerful catalyst for land conservation across the nation; and the younger generation of leaders who are taking over to manage a far more developed set of organizations that face complex challenges, ranging from climate change mitigation to easement defense. Her talk will consider how lessons learned by the older generation, and the new skills and perspectives brought to the table by the new generation, can be shared and leveraged to advance the effectiveness of land trusts across the continent.

Jean Hocker is president of Conservation Service Company, LLC, a consulting firm that draws on her long experience with land conservation and nonprofit organizations. From 1987 to 2002, she was President and CEO of the Land Trust Alliance, and subsequently served five years as a member of the Land Trust Accreditation Commission. From 1980 to 1987, she led the Jackson Hole Land Trust in Wyoming as its founding executive director. Jean is the 2014 recipient of the Land Trust Alliance’s Kingsbury Browne Leadership Award and is a Kingsbury Browne Fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. She chairs the board of the Wilderness Land Trust and serves on councils of the National Parks Conservation Association and the Grand Teton National Park Foundation. She has been a board member of the Lincoln Institute and the University of Wyoming’s Ruckelshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Boston University, Jean and her husband Phil have long enjoyed the outdoors as hikers, backpackers, and canoeists.