Central Coast, California
Santa Barbara County and Beyond
Working together so that our Central Coast ecosystems, economies and societies thrive.
LegacyWorks Central Coast California, based in Santa Barbara, shows up in service to community-driven initiatives from Big Sur to Ventura. All of our efforts emphasize trust building, connectedness and relationship. Through our work we hope to:
Build capacity within and among our community,
Employ the use of data and story telling to inform decision making, and
Catalyze collaborative action towards systems change.
We focus on highly collaborative projects that cannot be tackled by a single organization while emphasizing cross sector solutions to our most complex problems. Browse below to view recent Central Coast projects by impact areas, or use the button at right to see all our Central Coast projects.
Community Resilience
Community resilience has always been at the heart of our collaborative work, whether we’re supporting projects to advance nature based solutions, activate citizen stewards, reduce and heal trauma, or build our resilience to wildfire. Collaborative work is essential to resilience and strengthens our collective ability to anticipate, address, adapt and – when needed – bounce back from economic crises, pandemics, natural disasters and all the challenges we face. Community resilience requires a deep commitment to equity and building capacity.
Recent Projects: Community Resilience
Climate
The climate crisis is driving and compounding many of the challenges we face in our communities and regions. The impacts of drought, extreme heat, wildfire, storm surges, intense storms, flooding, and sea-level rise are impacting us all. Together with our partners and community members, we are finding common cause across divides in identifying and advancing community driven solutions customized to local conditions.
Recent Projects: Climate
Food and Agriculture
We depend upon farmers, ranchers and working lands to produce the food and fiber our communities need, but we often fail to protect and steward our local agricultural lands and economies. We work to ensure that local farms and ranches remain in production and adopt practices that build soil, absorb carbon and water, and provide habitat for wildlife, contribute to functioning ecosystems, while reliably producing nutritious food for our communities.
Recent Projects: Food and Agriculture
Land Conservation
LegacyWorks has its roots catalyzing innovative efforts to conserve, restore and steward the working lands and habitat that we depend upon, and land conservation continues to be a major part of our work. Whether we’re financing bridge loans, facilitating a complex partnership, helping conservation buyers find, protect and restore a dream property, or facilitating a landscape scale conservation collaborative or planning exercise, we love to show up in service of big land conservation outcomes.
Recent Projects: Land Conservation
Water
Clean and abundant water is the most essential resource for the wellbeing of communities, working lands, wildlife, and economies. In California’s Central Coast, more intense droughts, hotter weather, pollution and increasingly intense storm cycles combined with increased development, are adversely impacting water quality, quantity and flow. Flooding events, wildfire and water scarcity and aquatic habitat degradation have increased as a result. Addressing these complex challenges requires collaborative solutions and public-private partnerships.
Recent Projects: Water
Wildlife and Biodiversity
Protecting and recovering natural habitats, wildlife populations and threatened and endangered species is essential to community resilience. We engage in collaborative efforts with landowners, donors, nonprofit organizations, foundations and public agencies to create innovative solutions that yield benefits for wildlife and the communities that steward our working lands, landscapes and ecosystems.
Recent Projects: Wildlife and Biodiversity
Central Coast Partners
“LegacyWorks proved to be just what we needed in Isla Vista to focus collaboration towards a common goal of opening our Community Center. Their guidance and expertise allowed us to be our best and leap forward in the process unlike ever before.”
– Jonathan A. Abboud, Isla Vista Community Services District
