Greater Yellowstone
Idaho & Wyoming
Greater Yellowstone LegacyWorks enables regional-scale initiatives in the Teton Region and Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. We focus on large-scale, collaborative conservation and community resilience initiatives that any single organization cannot tackle. Our model has proved extremely effective in the region with projects focusing on solving major regional issues. Our community-driven work is focused in:
Click on the images above to view our projects in each region!
Our work across the Greater Yellowstone region has multifaceted impacts across several domains.
These include but are not limited to:
Climate
Community Resilience
Food and Agriculture
Wildlife and Biodiversity
Water Availability and Quality
The climate crisis is driving and compounding many of the challenges we face in our communities and regions. The impacts of drought, extreme heat, storm surges, intense storms, flooding, and sea-level rise are hitting home, and we are finding common cause across divides in identifying and advancing community driven solutions customized to East Yellowstone and Teton conditions. We steward a suite of climate action work that ranges from bipartisan climate resilience efforts to small-scale grassroots restoration to nature-based interventions at the landscape sale. All of these efforts require identifying opportunities to bring partners together, facilitating effective collaboration, and achieving project goals together.
Climate
Recent Projects: Climate
Community Resilience
Community resilience has always been at the heart of our collaborative work, whether advancing a conservation project, a regenerative economic development initiative, or a climate resilience collaborative. Community resilience is our collective ability to anticipate, address, adapt, and when needed bounce back from economic crises, pandemics, natural disasters and all the challenges we face, requiring a deep commitment to equity and building capacity. Communities that know how to mobilize and collaborate on complex challenges are more resilient to most everything. Communities that welcome everyone to share their voice and contribute their gifts are far more resilient still, since they benefit from the full breadth and depth of their people’s talents, perspectives and gifts.
Recent Projects: Community Resilience
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 and instead rely upon industrial agriculture and the global food system, a risky proposition in the face of pandemics, fertilizer shortages, and global supply chain failures. Our work with local food and agriculture initiatives in the East Yellowstone and Teton regions finds common ground amongst what might seem unlikely collaborators, enabling outcomes that simply aren’t possible without bridging divides.
Recent Projects: Food and Agriculture
Clean and abundant water is the most essential resource for the wellbeing of communities, working lands, wildlife, and economies. Paradoxically we’re experiencing more intense droughts, hotter weather and increasingly intense storm cycles, and ecosystems, communities, and economies have to adapt to this new reality. Addressing these complex challenges requires collaborative solutions and public-private partnerships. In the East Yellowstone and Teton regions, water is increasingly important and challenging to manage as we experience the impacts of the climate crisis. We work across divides to bring water users, managers and advocates together to align around a shared vision and craft durable solutions that make our communities, working lands and economies more resilient to the inevitable challenges we face.
Water Availability and Quality
Recent Projects: Water Availability and Quality
Protecting and recovering wildlife populations and threatened and endangered species has long been a core part of our work. In the Greater Yellowstone and Teton regions, we bring together private parties (landowners, farmers, ranches, donors, investors), 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. How our local wildlife populations fare is a leading indicator of our success or failure stewarding our landscapes and ecosystems. If our home in the East Yellowstone and Teton regions cannot support thriving and diverse populations of native wildlife species, they are unlikely to be able to support us, our farms, ranches, and food systems, our communities and our economies.
Wildlife and Biodiversity
Recent Projects: Wildlife and Biodiversity
Or explore some of our recent projects via our interactive storymap below!
“Working with LegacyWorks Group has been transformational for our organization, our collaborations and our community… there’s no going back to the how we used to do things.”
