Keep It Colorado

Land trust support: Keep It Colorado fundraises for and regrants financial support to Land Trusts for transaction cost assistance for perpetual conservation easements. These funds allow landowners who face financial barriers to convey a conservation easement and receive state tax incentives for their easement donation.

Education: Keep It Colorado serves as the central hub for information sharing, peer-to-peer learning and innovative problem solving in the conservation space. Keep It Colorado provides multiple statewide and regional convenings, conferences, and professional development opportunities annually. The coalitions newsletters, webinars and in-person presentations reach thousands of people annually through Colorado and the west. In 2023 Keep It Colorado hosted seven annual membership convenings focusing on innovating conservation tools, funding opportunities, and best practices for Land Trusts and open space agencies. Keep It Colorado also convenes monthly calls for different professional sectors across the conservation space to build a cohesive Coalition across the state.

Public policy: we build relationships with local, state and federal elected officials and other policy makers, serving as the unified voice for private Land conservation in Colorado. Our advocacy protects and enhances legal tools for conservation. In 2023, Keep It Colorado worked to protect investments in conservation by supporting grand county's ballot issue 1a, which renewed and made permanent a sales tax for open lands, rivers and trails. We built a comprehensive public database of local taxes that are used to advance conservation and open space. We began to build a Coalition around increasing Colorado's conservation easement tax credit, saving from expiration essential state programs that support the tax credit, and making a portion of the state tax credit immediately refundable every year. We also continued our work on state planning processes that will guide how the state ensures that we are able to Keep Colorado the Colorado we all love.