OUR CORE INITIATIVES AND STRATEGIES

The Bay Area Open Space Council is committed to the following three broad initiatives and strategies, and will work collaboratively throughout the region to achieve them.

Sustainable Funding

• Secure sufficient, sustainable funding for farms and ranches, forests, parks, trails, and natural areas.
• Ensure funding to protect and steward resource-rich landscapes, including provisions for the Upland Habitat Goals Project recommendations, so that our natural areas sustain healthy ecosystems with diverse plants and animals.
• Encourage stable funding sources to provide for land stewardship including operations, maintenance, and restoration efforts.

Nature Within Reach

• Connect land and people by increasing opportunities for Bay Area residents to learn about, enjoy, and steward the natural areas, parks, trails, farms, and ranches that surround our communities.
• Significantly increase recreational, stewardship, and environmental education opportunities, particularly for underserved communities.
• Ensure that the farms and ranches, parks, trails and natural areas that border our communities thrive themselves, and provide the healthy land and watersheds that we need to access to local food and enjoy clean water and air.
• Increase public awareness of issues affecting land and water.
• Foster stewardship, restoration, community dialogue, and civic engagement.

Thriving Communities

• Support collaborative leadership and create active partnerships for projects that meet the community’s conservation, transportation, housing, education, public health, and social equity goals. Serve as a model for collaborative partnerships.
• Influence policy to help maintain and enhance the Bay Area’s network of open space lands and protect the Bay Area’s high quality of life.
• Protect land in part by making our communities great places to live, where people can lead healthy lives.
• Advance community and conservation planning that considers climate change and creates an ecologically-sustainable, socially-equitable model for economic development.