We’re providing this grant application form and language deliberately, for those in the philanthropic communities interested in the larger parameters of impact and our own proven experience. (None of the text below may be used without express permission). Disclosure: We used AI to organize thousands of pages of our own writings in order to format a succinct grant application.
1. Briefly describe your organization’s work in one to three sentences. Include your primary goals, intended outcomes, and primary beneficiares.
We are a women-led not-for-profit foundation with the mission of land conservation and ecological food systems innovation. SHO Farm (formerly Teal Farm) has been our main project since 2003. For more than twenty-three years, we have practiced relational land care through agroforestry plantings, forest farming, habitat restoration, and the cultivation of food and medicine across the farm's 1300 acres from an increasingly kinship-centered and animist worldview.
Our primary goal is to transition this land beyond our sole ownership into an enduring structure of collective custodianship that can integrate food sovereignty and relational land care across generations.
We are designing governance and tenure frameworks by assessing legal and tax tools like cooperative ownership structures, ongoing nonprofit ownership with long-term stewardship leases, and a kinship-based conservation easement—that embed affirmative land-care responsibilities into a durable, yet dynamic legal form.
Our intended outcomes include: 1) Reliable farmer/grower access to ecological food systems rooted in reciprocity, perennial, annual, and forest-based food-medicines; 2) Replicable land transition models for aligned land owners and organizations; 3) Long-term protection of 1,300 acres from fragmentation or sale to a single high-net-worth buyer; 4) Strengthened biological richness, climatic resilience, and cultural stability.
Primary beneficiaries include land custodians/growers, extended human communities, terrestrial and aquatic communities, and future generations.
The broader public benefits from protected working lands that integrate conservation, food sovereignty, and deep intimacy with place. Additional beneficiaries include transitioning landowners, non-profit, and institutional property holders who are seeking alternatives to conventional sale, subdivision or traditional conservation.
Our work seeks to ensure that ecological land care provides economic 'enoughness' during a time of accelerating land conversion, financial strain, and increasingly unaffordable land and housing for food-growing.
2. Briefly describe the need or the issue you are solving. What significant progress has your organization made against these issues to date?
Across Vermont and the United States, land owners and ecological farmers face a structural crisis. Rising property taxes, escalating land values, healthcare costs, development pressure, and limited access to financing for community-scale farming livelihoods are forcing aging farmers and the conservation-minded to sell land that has often been cherished over decades. Even deeply committed conservationists frequently lack succession pathways that allow land to remain ecologically intact while also supporting essential food-centered livelihoods.
Traditional conservation easements often prevent subdivision but do not address livelihood viability, increased costs of living (property taxes), or collective governance. Meanwhile, farmland transitions (in Vermont especially) increasingly favor absentee ownership, extractive timber-cutting, or residential fragmentation. The result is a quiet erosion of land access, ecological continuity, and food sovereignty.
Our organization has confronted these pressures directly. Over the past twenty-three years we have: 1) Transitioned fields from conventional hay production toward perennial and riparian agroforestry systems, increasing biodiversity and pollinator habitat and long-term soil stability; 2) Partnered with beaver-created wetlands to grow food, while enhancing hydrological resilience and habitat complexity; 3) Established perennial nut, fruit, fungal, and medicinal systems that demonstrate forest-based food production at scale; 4) Operated as a wildlife refuge and sanctuary, expanding habitat corridors and protecting biodiversity across 1,300 contiguous acres; 5) Developed rich educational materials and research initiatives documenting regional edible and medicinal species to promote place-based cuisine and food sovereignty via traditional fermentation knowledge; 6) We have preserved the integrity of the land, casting residents as an extended land kinship network vs. agents of fragmentation; 7) We have demonstrated that food-growing systems also act as multi-species habitats and well-being.
The remaining challenge is structural permanence. Without an innovative tenure transition model, even progressive regenerative landscapes remain vulnerable to generational change, economic stress, or market forces. Our current work addresses this structural gap directly.
3. Describe the specific activities and innovative strategies your organization uses.
Our work operates simultaneously at pragmatic, ecological, cultural, and structural levels.
Ecological Strategies: Forest-Centered Food Sovereignty
We cultivate a polyculture of many species across successional layers over the growing season, rather than relying on monoculture plantings. These include: 1) Nut and mast systems (oak, chestnut, hickory, hazelnut); 2) Fruit and berry guilds (mulberry, elderberry, seaberry, aronia, hawthorn, pear, apple); 3) Mushroom cultivation integrated with forest biomass; 4) Wetland foods cultivated in partnership with beaver hydrology; 5) Perennial greens and medicinal understory plants.
This distributed, perennial model increases biodiversity, strengthens soil carbon accumulation, moderates flood and drought cycles, and reduces reliance on annual tillage. It also aligns food production with habitat enhancement rather than habitat displacement. This model also depends on a wide community of growers, gatherers, food preparation and fermentation specialists, and propagators to succeed at scale.
We integrate fermentation, preservation, and regional culinary development to transform forest and wetland harvests into nutrient-dense foods. This expands the economic viability of smaller-volume perennial production to share the harvests in experiential tasting events, community exchange, and through the sale of products online.
(Structural) Innovation: Kinship Worldview-Centered Land Tenure
Our most innovative strategy lies in governance design. We are assessing a number of possible interlocking mechanisms:
Collective Stewardship Cooperative – A multi-stakeholder structure allowing resident land custodians to hold stewardship rights and responsibilities without requiring speculative ownership;
Nonprofit Ownership with Long-Term Leaseholds ensuring that land remains mission-aligned while providing livelihood stability for resident stewards;
Kinship Conservation Covenant – A next-generation easement that articulates affirmative and reciprocal responsibilities amongst human and non-human communities: welcoming biodiversity, encouraging wetlands, cultivating perennial food systems, and working alongside ecological succession. This differs from traditional static preservation by recognizing that active, skillful human presence strengthens land and place far into the future.
These frameworks directly address the tenure crisis facing regenerative farmers and forest guardians. They are designed to prevent fragmentation, reduce individual tax burden through shared structures, and embed relational ethics in creative and credible legal form.
Replicability and Scaling
Our intention is not to create an isolated experiment but a replicable model. We are: 1) Documenting governance templates and legal language for use by others; 2) Sharing our experience linking tenure reform with ecological food/sovereignty systems; 3) Convening land stewards and conservation professionals to refine and disseminate the model; 4) Integrating our biome-wide catalog of edible and medicinal species with tenure design to demonstrate how ecological knowledge and structural reform reinforce one another.
Scaling occurs via transparently disseminating the model, by including its successes and failures. By offering legal frameworks that contemplate self-sustaining financial scenarios rooted in enoughness alongside ecological restoration, we enable other land stewards to creatively transition acreage in any location in alignment with regenerative and relational principles.
Immediate benefits include protected acreage and stabilized stewardship, ie land for farmers. Incremental change includes regional adoption of cooperative or collective tenure. Systemic change emerges as land trusts, conservation organizations, and regenerative farmers adopt kinship worldview-aligned covenant language and collective governance tools.
4. How are beneficiaries or stakeholders involved?
Our relational land transition initiative is designed around an expanded understanding of beneficiaries and stakeholders. Rather than limiting involvement to legal owners or program participants, this project recognizes all beings affected by land governance as stakeholders—including human communities, future generations, and the ecological systems that sustain life (ie the trees, the water, the wildlife, the soil life, etc).
Stakeholder involvement is therefore embedded at multiple levels; ecological, community, professional, and institutional.
Ecological and Community Stakeholders
At the core of the model is the living landscape herself: forest, soil, water, wildlife habitat, and biodiversity systems. These ecological systems are treated not as passive backdrops, but as active stakeholders whose long-term health guides governance decisions. Management practices prioritize regenerative land stewardship, habitat continuity, and watershed integrity. Ecological monitoring, habitat planning, and long-term stewardship commitments are integrated into the governance framework.
Human stakeholders include current residents, neighboring communities, and future generations. Community members participate in governance structures designed to distribute responsibility rather than concentrate ownership. Through shared stewardship models, long-term leases, cooperative structures, and conservation overlays, participants gain stable access to land while accepting defined stewardship obligations. This ensures that involvement is not extractive but reciprocal.
The model also supports intergenerational continuity. Governance documents are structured to prioritize long-term ecological health over short-term financial gain, giving future beneficiaries a voice through durable covenants and fiduciary obligations embedded in legal frameworks.
Transitioning Landowners and Agricultural Stakeholders
A significant stakeholder group includes aging landowners, farmers, ranchers, and nonprofit property holders who are seeking alternatives to conventional sale or subdivision. The Foundation documents multiple pathways including cooperative models, community land trust structures, nonprofit overlays, and hybrid capital stacks so that landowners can evaluate options aligned with their values.
For agricultural stakeholders, including farmers without succession plans, widows managing inherited land, and family farms facing development pressure, the project offers replicable governance templates and decision trees. Their involvement includes contributing case studies, participating in model testing, and helping refine transition tools so that the framework reflects real-world complexity rather than theoretical design.
Professional Stakeholders
Attorneys, land planners, appraisers, brokers, CPAs, wealth advisors, foresters, wildlife biologists, and ecological designers are essential stakeholders. Many professionals encounter clients seeking conservation or community-centered outcomes but lack structured templates to guide them.
The Foundation will actively engage with these professionals, expanding their resources by sharing our complex case study, process and selected final documents. By documenting alternatives considered — including those ultimately not selected — the project creates a professional resource library. This reduces ambiguity and professional liability while expanding the toolkit available to advisors serving mission-driven landowners.
Land-based practitioners, such as agroforestry designers, regenerative farmers, and permaculture specialists, are engaged to ensure that tenure structures support long-term ecological investment. Their input shapes lease duration, stewardship obligations, and governance participation so that ecological work is not undermined by short-term ownership turnover.
Financial and Institutional Stakeholders
Banks, lenders, impact investors, and family offices are engaged as stakeholders in order to address perceived risk. Relational governance reorganizes financial structure. The model clarifies collateral positions, defines equity layers, establishes predictable operating agreements, and outlines transfer provisions to ensure underwriting clarity.
Financial stakeholders are involved through review of capital structures, assessment of risk mitigation provisions, and alignment with regulatory standards. By translating relational principles into enforceable legal language, the project provides reassurance that stewardship-based governance can coexist with fiduciary and lending requirements.
Institutional landholders, including large timberland managers, conservation nonprofits, and family offices — are engaged as case-study contributors and advisory participants. Their participation ensures the model is scalable beyond a single property and adaptable to different ownership contexts.
Public Education and Open-Source Resource Development
A core, if later outcome of the initiative is the production of a publicly accessible resource library. This includes governance templates, transition flowcharts, legal language examples, valuation frameworks, and capital models. Stakeholders contribute to and benefit from this documentation.
By openly sharing alternative pathways, including those not adopted in the Foundation’s own transition, the project broadens its beneficiary base. Communities, nonprofits, landowners, and advisors nationwide can draw from tested frameworks without bearing the full cost of experimentation.
Ongoing Feedback and Adaptive Governance
By expanding who is recognized as a stakeholder and embedding that recognition into enforceable governance structures, the initiative transforms land transition from a private transaction into a shared public benefit.
5. Desired short- and long-term outcomes
Short-term (1-3 years)
1) Protect 1,300 acres from subdivision during transition phase; 2)Draft and legally review cooperative and lease structures; 3) Complete kinship-centered conservation covenant language; 4) Convene 10–20 prospective stewards in governance design sessions; 5) Produce publicly accessible templates and documentation; 6) Continuously plant and tend forest edge and pastures with assisted successional nut tree plantings and perennial native food plants.
Quantitative indicators:
1) Acres under permanent protection (1,300); 2) Number of governance documents completed (minimum 3 core instruments) 3) Number of community design/farming participants (5–15) 4) Number of public documents published (3+ templates or case studies)
Long-Term (5-15 years)
1) Fully transition land into collective custodianship; 2) Maintain continuous ecological stewardship without fragmentation 3) Demonstrate increased biodiversity indices; 4) Inspire adoption of kinship-centered easement language by at least 3–5 additional land projects; 5) Contribute to regional food sovereignty through expanded perennial production and accelerated local community engagement.
Evaluation includes financial viability reviews and documentation of replication by peer organizations
Learning cycles include annual reflection sessions with stewards and partners, refinement of governance language, and dissemination of findings amongst stakeholders.
Success looks like a cultural shift towards a kinship worldview that centers on land that remains ecologically intact, food-producing, and collectively tended beyond the founding generation.
6. Additional Context
We are at a generational inflection point. Many regenerative land stewards lack viable succession pathways. Without innovation, restored landscapes risk fragmentation or conversion.
Our work integrates three elements rarely combined: 1) Forest-based perennial food systems; 2) Wildlife refuge-scale habitat protection; 3) Durable collective land tenure design.
By embedding relational ethics into governance documents and legal instruments, we aim to demonstrate that conservation, food production, and community stewardship can function as one coherent system.