In my first report (Feb. 19, 2024), our role, members, and responsibilities were laid out. We regularly remind ourselves that “Land Stewardship Project’s mission is to foster an ethic of stewardship for farmland, to promote sustainable agriculture and to develop healthy communities.”

I am pleased with our committee members and the way they learn, listen, and work together. We have spent time on topics such as our values, goals, history, previous long-range plans, membership demographics, three faces of power, equity, climate, our nine program areas, and contracting with a consulting partner.

I am also pleased with our actions.  We contracted with Seiche, a social impact strategy and communications firm. They have been very helpful in survey question wording, type of questions asked, and now, compiling the responses. Seiche has also been very helpful with the listening session logistics, facilitation guides, and compiling the notes and takeaways.

We have developed a survey which was sent out via e-mail and postal service. Our goal of getting 500 responses has been exceeded. We have received 539 so far!

We invited members to listening sessions with the intent of getting member reflections on what the long-range committee should include or consider putting in this next plan.  Six venues were identified, and four have taken place. So far, 57 people have participated in a listening session. These have been small groups and good conversations!

Next Steps

• We are identifying the partners that we want to visit with in the next weeks.

• We have started talking about the basics of the draft for this plan. At this point in time, we like the idea of a brief plan with links to further information related to that topic. We think this could be a nice balance with wanting to make a plan easy and quick to read, while also having a way of satisfying our “wordiness” when we want to explain and define topics and issues. We just met with Brian DeVore this morning and will be further refining what we want this document to look and sound like in the coming weeks.

• Our goal is to have a draft of this plan to present to LSP’s board of directors by the end of June. Assuming they approve the draft, this committee celebrates and sunsets. Then the details and finishing needs will be worked on for completion. Hopefully, we can celebrate that we did the best we could in making member and staff contributions an integral part of the process of guiding the next five years for this awesome organization.

May your spring be safe and fulfilling.  Thank you.

Respectfully,
Bonnie Haugen, Long Range Plan Committee Chair

I am happy to share with you the Long Range Plan Committee’s progress so far and a ballpark timeline of what’s to come. 

We held our first meeting by Zoom on January 12, and since then, we have met weekly (most often). We met in person once at the end of January. Our committee members are a nice mix of age, members, staff, board, and geographic areas. Our members are Josh Bryceson, Laurie Driessen, Claudia Lenz, Dan McGrath, Nick Olson, Beth Slocum, Megan Smith, Josie Trople, Terry VanDerPol, and Bonnie Haugen.  

I accepted chairing this committee not because I know what should be in this plan, but because I am very interested in listening to people on what they think should be in our plan. I am energized by the committee. My goal is to keep a calm urgency in this process, be transparent, and keep us on task. At each meeting, we remind ourselves that “Land Stewardship Project’s mission is to foster an ethic of stewardship for farmland, to promote sustainable agriculture and to develop healthy communities.”     

To understand where we are now, we spent time in January as a committee grounding ourselves on the history of LSP, program areas, current and emerging work, theories of change related to our work and broader movement and brainstormed on what questions this plan needs to answer and what big buckets of our work need to be included.  

Happening Now

We recently divided ourselves into sub-committees for survey development and the member meetings. The survey sub-committee is working on the survey questions, form and delivery choices right now with a goal to send the survey out the first days/week of March. The listening sessions sub-committee will soon be figuring out our facilitation guidelines for the gatherings to take place in mid to later March.  

In February, we began contracting with Seiche, a social impact strategy and communications firm, who have already been a tremendous help in this process. Seiche is the same firm that worked with LSP on the communications audit and recommendations and have built an understanding of LSP. Seiche will: 

• Assist with survey questions, survey distribution strategy, survey implementation, and survey analysis. 
• Help with logistics and facilitation for in-person gatherings. Further they will help capture and report themes from the listening sessions.   
• Help us to develop our ally and partner outreach strategy. 
• After all of the data is collected, Seiche will draft a report of the findings, and be available for engagement to ask questions or offer feedback as we develop the Long Range Plan. 

Coming Up Next

The ally and partner visits may take place in April. April and May, information will be examined, with a goal to have our new long-range plan drafted by end of June. Brian DeVore will be helping with the writing of the plan. 

I aim to submit an update on our work with you all again in mid-March. 

Respectfully,
Bonnie Haugen, Long Range Plan Committee Chair