Water Summit, Cleveland Metroparks & Trust for Public Land City Center Tour, & More!
Land Trust Alliance always prepares a timely, lively, and engaging annual meeting for conservation professionals from across the nation. For 2025, Cleveland set a stage for learning new things, creating solutions for modern challenges faced by all, and taking creative ideas, practices, and new contacts back home to apply in our region!
My “Rally” began with the inaugural Water Summit. Peers shared partnerships and projects with green infrastructure, community stewardship, and priority population benefits wrapped in a conservation acquisition. As we re-visited the local story of a long-range, coordinated, and highly successful recovery from world-newsworthy Cuyahoga River pollution from an industrial to today’s bikeable, walkable, and LIVE-able waterfront area, it sunk in that the success was born from somebodies’ vision for a better place to call home, and simultaneously attract new residents, businesses, and investments to this now-thriving downtown, and connected to open spaces around and well-beyond the city limits.
This collage includes scenes from Cleveland 2025, the Land Trust Alliance’s National Land Conservation Conference and Water Summit!
Day two took by barge and bike with Trust for Public Land, Cleveland MetroParks, Bike Cleveland, Cuyahoga County Planning Commission, and other partners with peers from around the country to tour these projects firsthand. The barge took us from Irish Bend Park to where the Cuyahoga empties into Lake Erie, under a railroad draw-bridge.
Irish Bend is being transformed from a dump site with accumulated impacts from homelessness, into a community park with green infrastructure which protects the river and bank while serving all residents, including those living in a newly-built community housing for individuals and families. The project improves the space considerably for all, while honoring, a historic area in “The Flats” where Irish settlers coalesced two centuries ago with public art in the shape of doors with settlers’ names and stories. The parks’ walking paths and children’s play spaces offers passive recreation, while an amphitheater facilitates community-led programming of concerts, educational outreach, and theater. The project required moving TONS of rock, soil, and abandoned materials before stabilizing the slope, re-grading for improved elevational gradients, and green infrastructure to ensure run-off into the Cuyahoga’s River’s active shipping channel remains clean for wildlife, plants, and humans who depend on it.
The second half of our tour was on e-bike, where wheels took us over to follow a Towpath Trail marking where mules towed industrial canal boats up and downriver. Ohio and Erie’s Towpath trail extends for over 90 miles, and extends through Cleveland’s City Center, as well as Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Along the way, representatives from Coalition partners joined us to share stories from vision to funding to implementation, to enjoying the first public bike ride along the pathway. We also learned about business investments, including residential projects making the most of these urban, open spaces in their planning, which are being completed each year to offer brand-new residential living options for the current demographic moving into the city center, primarily millennials and generation Z.
By Day 3 of Rally, we were all choosing concurrent training workshops on a range of topics, and I gravitate to those which include Land Protection Policy, Investment Strategies, and Tribal Engagement while our staff participate in Stewardship and Acquisition topics. Our final day was a whirlwind of educational and stimulating sessions, capped off by an evening event at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame which gave us all new stories of fellowship and shared passion for all things MUSIC, as well as new energy for returning to our respective conservation projects! As is tradition, we capped off attending Rally with an urban scooter ride from the closing event back to our lodging in the historic Tower City Center building, former home of Metro station - when streetcars were the main form of transportation.
Professional development, especially learning esoteric approaches to complex, unique, and surprising challenges of land acquisition and stewardship is something best learned within a community who fosters the lifelong learning capacity of all. Your support of our continued education improves our work outcomes for the betterment of all. Thank you!
