Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

TLC is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in all aspects of our work. We believe that our goal of sharing land conservation benefits with every single person in the Triangle cannot be reached without actively working to end systemic racism, which for centuries has led to ongoing inequities in access to and enjoyment of the outdoors. TLC is dedicated to becoming a more productive and authentic land trust by not just celebrating diversity, but working to become an anti-racist organization. We must continue to have open and active discussions about race, equity, and inclusion in our organization and in the land trust community. We must also use our unique position and resources that we have as a land trust to ensure the benefits of land conservation are shared with everyone in our community by continuing to partner with and support organizations led by Black people and people of color, to work with businesses owned by people of color, and to connect with communities of color.

This history of land conservation, the very core of our work, has historically perpetuated systemic racism

Every acre of land in this country has a long, often unrecognized or forgotten, history of people who lived and worked there. Since the beginning of this country, native people, and then enslaved Africans, lived on and took care of the lands TLC conserves today. When white colonists arrived in America, they stole ancestral lands from native people and brought with them enslaved Africans who were forced to labor on that land. After the Civil War, former slaves and their descendants acquired land. In 1910, rural African American farm families held between 16 and 19 million acres of farmland. Today, that number has dropped to just over 2.5 million acres. Some of that is due to urbanization, but much of it was taken from African Americans through threats of violence, lynching, and racist laws. It’s also a sad fact that much of the history of access to open space protection is inextricably linked with racism: indigenous people were removed from their land in the name of conservation to create most of our national parks. With stolen land and labor, white people built wealth exclusively for other white people. There is a direct line between that generational wealth and economic disparities today.

What we’ve done and what we continue to work on

TLC has been working to become an anti-racist organization for several years now. We’ve taken important steps, but there is more work to be done to ensure all people have access to outdoor spaces. One of our current and ongoing projects is to figure out ways to increase and support Black land ownership.

At our nature preserves, we’ve worked to tell part of the properties’ histories. When TLC opened Horton Grove Nature Preserve in 2012, we named the trails in honor of the descendants of enslaved Black people who were forced to live and work on the land for generations. We are also working to document and share the histories of Black and Indigenous communities at Bailey and Sarah Williamson Preserve.

As an organization, we’ve prioritized working with minority-owned vendors and continuously search for new vendors owned by Black people and people of color. When recruiting board members, we use a “diversity matrix” that includes geography (to be representative of the six counties in our region), gender, age, and race. We have also improved our hiring procedures by expanding the places we post job announcements, “blinding” resumes to remove information that might indicate race (which results in implicit bias), and ensuring our interview committees are diverse. Since 2016, TLC has paid for all staff to attend a two-day training with the Racial Equity Institute. TLC also provides numerous training programs, workshops, webinars, and staff retreats to examine how racism impacts each of us and our work. Among the groups we’ve hired to help us in our journey are Alexa Broderick from The Equity Paradigm, who facilitated two staff retreats, and the NC Center for Nonprofits series, Walking the Talk, in which most staff have participated.

After years of exploring issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion as an organization and individually, TLC staff has worked with numerous partners to develop the Good Ground Initiative (GGI), a program that expands TLC’s existing efforts to conserve agricultural land facing development pressures and addresses historic disparities in landownership structures.

Resources that have helped our staff

About Indigenous communities in the Triangle:

About systemic racism and how to be anti-racist:

Websites:

Articles/projects:

Books

Podcasts

Information on systemic racism in conservation and land ownership:

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