Bill Leahy Announcement

LegacyWorks is pleased to announce Bill Leahy as the newest member of our Santa Barbara team. Bill joined LegacyWorks in the Fall of 2022 after living up the coast on the 25,000-acre Jack & Laura Dangermond Preserve, where he served as Deputy Director for several years. 

Bill's work in community-based land conservation gave him the opportunity to protect a diverse array of critical natural areas, parks, and open spaces from the shores of the Chesapeake Bay to midwest prairies and rivers to the deserts and coastlines of California. While land protection has been fulfilling, Bill believes that conservation must serve the communities that make their homes in these places as well as the natural environment. While Executive Director of The Big Sur Land Trust and the Maryland Environmental Trust, Bill promoted regional collaboration to achieve landscape-scale conservation and strategic partnerships to tackle land use issues tied to climate change, clean water, and environmental justice, repositioning both organizations to be more diverse, responsive, and focused on building healthy and resilient local communities.

In addition to the roles noted above, Bill has held several leadership positions with The Nature Conservancy in California and Missouri and served as Board Chair of the California Council of Land Trusts. Before his land conservation career, Bill had a successful stint in commercial real estate in Washington, D.C. 

Bill will serve as Regional Director of the Santa Barbara Initiative and work closely with Ellen, Carl and the entire Santa Barbara team to steward our existing projects and partnerships and catalyze new ones that advance the community’s top priorities across land restoration and protection, climate and wildfire resilience, community wellbeing, social justice, data dashboards and more.  

"LegacyWorks' commitment to showing up in service to the community is important and what attracted me to this opportunity. With the expert facilitation and support that LegacyWorks brings, transformative relationships and collaborations that would not happen are made possible. It is an exciting time to be in Santa Barbara and a part of this great team of people."

Bill, his wife Lorien and Mabel, their border collie, moved down the coast to set down roots in the City of Santa Barbara in July. Please join us in welcoming them! If you’d like to connect directly, you can reach him at bill@legacyworksgroup.com.  

P.S. As you can tell, our team is growing! We are always looking for great people to play important roles in a variety of ways and places (check out our current needs here). Stay tuned as we introduce more fantastic folks over the coming weeks.

P.P.S. Some fun facts about our team: 26 paid team members played roles in our work in the past year, and we have six volunteer board members, for a total of 32 team members! Holy smokes! Remarkably, 15 of the 32 have served as chief executives of one or more nonprofits, social enterprises, foundations, or academic institutions. It gives me great pride that so many experienced leaders like Bill have decided to make LegacyWorks the home of their impact work in the world!