Ellen Jacquart was CILTI’s founder and first president. Now a board member, she contributed these thoughts on what it was like to pioneer starting a land trust in 1990.
After grad school, I moved to Indiana in 1987 to work as an intern at the Indiana DNR Division of Nature Preserves. That job transformed my life.
John Bacone [another current board member] was in the middle of his four decades of leadership of the DNP. While working alongside John and others in the department—Lee Casebere, Jim Aldrich, and Mike Homoya—I tried to soak up as much knowledge as I could. And in the process, I figured out what I wanted to do with my life: protect and manage natural areas!
I was surrounded by Indianapolis-based ecologists who were researching and protecting natural areas around the state. We frequently got calls about sites that didn’t meet the standards for protection. There was nowhere to refer people if they wanted to protect land in Central Indiana. There was no safety net.
After my internship ended, I got a job as a research assistant at Holcomb Research Institute (at Butler University). My new team faced the same issue. We were studying the effects of acid rain on protected sites around Indiana, but we saw land being gobbled up all around Central Indiana. Given all the development pressure in Marion County and surrounding counties, we really needed an organization to try to preserve the best forest and wetland remnants.
We knew the importance of protecting land for research, as well as for its ecological value. But we couldn’t do anything about it as an institution. Something had to happen.
Since my DNP colleagues worked for the state, they couldn’t do it. But I didn’t work for the state anymore. I thought to myself, “Can I do this? I’ve never organized anything bigger than a pitch-in dinner. Can I organize a land trust?”
I met with John Bacone and he convinced me that, yes, I could. He also recommended Jim Barrett as a resource. Jim was the primary author of the Nature Preserves Act and one of the founders of ACRES Land Trust in Fort Wayne. We put together a public meeting at the War Memorial and invited Jim to share the step by step process of forming a land trust.
We asked the folks present if they would join a land trust if it existed. Everyone at the public meeting raised their hands—they would join.
Jim walked us through the process we would need to complete, every step of which seemed complicated and difficult:
- Come up with a name for the organization.
- Create a board of directors.
- Prepare and file Articles of Incorporation.
- Appoint a registered agent.
- Draft the bylaws.
- Apply for an Employer Identification Number with the IRS.
I had no experience in any of this, but I learned a new term—”pro bono lawyer”—that was the secret to making much of this happen.
It took time, but then, suddenly, we were there. In 1990, we were incorporated as a nonprofit with me as president and Dan Zay as vice-president.
Our intent back then was to pick up the pieces that the Department of Nature Preserves and the Nature Conservancy couldn’t. The land had to have some kind of natural value. We didn’t have a strategy at that time like CILTI does now. We knew we couldn’t catch every site, but we could save some and keep them from being lost.
It was an exciting time, and a challenging one. Just as we were getting started with CILTI, Butler University closed Holcomb Research Institute and I was out of a job. There weren’t many job openings for a botanist in Indiana. So when I saw the opportunity to be the first botanist for the Hoosier National Forest, I jumped at it. However, working out of Bedford would make it difficult to oversee CILTI, so I reluctantly handed over the presidency to Dan Zay and moved south.
What a thrill it is to see, all these years later, how large and successful CILTI has become from those very humble beginnings. It is an honor to serve on the board at this moment in the organization’s history.
Ellen Jacquart
Board Member