Force Multiplier: Building the Sentinel Landscapes Support Organization

A desert tortoise walks through the terrain of the Tortoise Research and Captive Rearing Site | Photo by Lance Cpl. Richard PerezGarcia

When Stephanie Dashiell first heard about the Mojave Desert Sentinel Landscape Coordinator position, one phrase stood out: force multiplier.

After 15 years working on conservation in the desert, she was drawn to the rare convergence of conservation, working lands, and national defense—and the possibility of achieving greater impact through partnership. “If we can work collaboratively, it’s an exponential gain,” Stephanie says. “When people are aligned, it’s better for the ecosystems we’re trying to protect.”

Stephanie joined LegacyWorks Group in June 2025 as coordinator of the newly designated Mojave Desert Sentinel Landscape, becoming one of nineteen coordinators nationwide—and one of eight housed at LegacyWorks Group, the program’s dedicated support organization.

LegacyWorks’ role in the Sentinel Landscapes Partnership began in fall 2022 with a short-term consulting engagement focused on strengthening planning across the network. But through extensive interviews with coordinators and federal partners, a deeper need surfaced: the partnership required integrated, long-term backbone support to reach its full potential.

“It felt a bit like an archaeological dig at first. We were uncovering all the pieces of what this could become,” says Carl Palmer, Executive Director of LegacyWorks. “But once we started mapping it out—fiscal management, subawards, HR, communications, GIS, facilitation, fundraising support, partnership strategy—it was like pulling a finger from the dike. There was so much alignment and energy around building something integrated that could truly serve the whole network.”

What began as a modest engagement quickly evolved. In 2023, LegacyWorks partnered with the Department of War’s Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration (REPI) Program and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to design and launch the Sentinel Landscapes Partnership Support Organization through formal cooperative agreements that established LegacyWorks as the network’s fiscal agent and operational hub. Today, LegacyWorks manages federal funds and subawards, employs coordinators and resilience specialists, and provides strategic, operational, and partnership support nationwide.

“I take a lot of pride in the way we’ve applied the LegacyWorks model—centering relationship-building and moving at the speed of trust,” says Court Smith, Sentinel Landscapes Support Director. “It’s about showing up consistently until we’re woven into the fabric of the partnership—trusted and steady—so people can say, ‘LegacyWorks will take care of that,’ and know that we will.”

Stephanie Dashiell holding a desert tortoise

For coordinators like Stephanie, that steady infrastructure translates into meaningful, added capacity on the ground. Through peer learning calls, shared tools, and direct access to a support team with diverse expertise, she has both practical support and strategic guidance. Just as important is LegacyWorks’ philosophical approach. “The spiral model, starting with one success and building outward from there makes it manageable,” Stephanie says. “In a landscape this big with close to 3.6 million acres, that mindset makes all the difference.”

Not even a year into Stephanie’s leadership, the Mojave Desert Sentinel Landscape (MDSL) is already seeing great wins. In October 2025, six MDSL partners were notified by the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation of awards totaling $2.2M to start or continue ongoing conservation work for Mojave desert tortoise recovery. In December 2025, MDSL secured assistance from the National Park Service Rivers, Trails, and Conservation Assistance program to support the collaborative process of developing the MDSL Implementation Plan. Finally, just this week, a $1.5M America’s Ecosystem Restoration Initiative grant was reactivated by transferring the award to a key MDSL partner,  the Mojave Desert Land Trust. These successes speak to the catalytic impact of a sentinel landscape coordinator in strengthening connection and trust to create the force multiplication that Stephanie envisioned actualizing.

At its core, LegacyWorks hopes to create a home for sentinel landscape coordinators and resilience specialists—one that not only manages funds and operations, but actively builds leadership and partnership capacity. “Our vision is to be the organizational hearth for these changemakers,” Carl explains, “to support and inspire them so they can really soar—showing what’s possible when diverse partners are aligned around something that’s both locally meaningful and critical to our national security.”