Purpose, Results, and Potential

In 2013 and 2014, Laura Johnson, following her 14-year tenure as President of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, held a Bullard Fellowship at the Harvard Forest, Harvard University. The Bullard Fellowship is designed to allow “individuals representing a variety of disciplines and approaches an opportunity to foster their scientific and professional growth and to contribute to research on forests at Harvard.”

During her Bullard fellowship, Johnson wrote a paper fundamental to the growth of the International Land Conservation Network (ILCN) at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a network then in the process of being organized. Published as a Lincoln Institute Working Paper, the paper was titled “An Open Field: Emerging Opportunities for a Global Private Land Conservation Movement.” It included evaluation framework for land trust movements with three pillars: a legal framework, a financial framework, and an institutional framework.

In 2023, Johnson was awarded the Kingsbury Browne Fellowship and Award, an honor sponsored by the Land Trust Alliance (the umbrella organization for land trusts in the United States) and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The award recognizes individuals who have enriched the land conservation community by demonstrating outstanding leadership, innovation, and creativity. For the Fellowship portion of the Kingsbury Browne honor, Johnson has written a new analysis using the evaluation framework which she developed as a Bullard Fellow to consider the progress of the ILCN—created in 2014—over the past ten years, as well as the challenges and opportunities facing the Network in the coming decades.