Leadership Circle

Over the past decade, AdkAction has found its niche within the non-profit landscape as a creator of innovative and much-needed projects, serving as a catalyst for action and change in the region. The Adirondack region is home to some of the most beautiful scenery in the world and is a success story for land conservation, and AdkAction is working to help the region’s communities become as resilient and vibrant as the landscape itself. With your help we will be able to dramatically increase the positive impacts of our core projects, and launch new, innovative projects as new needs emerge. 

It takes time to build community and momentum. We’ve spent the last 11+ years building relationships across the region to create a network–a vibrant community–of neighbors, members, volunteers, and partners. We are now in a position to expand our impact in the region and have an even more sizable impact. 

We are at a critical juncture where we need to make investments in our capacity as an organization to help lead the region towards a more sustainable, vibrant, and equitable future. We want to seize this opportunity to grow and better serve the amazing people in the Adirondack region and help elevate the issues that impact us all. We are all about bringing people together around concrete issues that we have the power to solve, collectively, with tangible solutions. We are an organization that gets things done, and we need your help to continue. 

We’ve done a lot with a little over the past decade and learned to be resourceful. We operate with flexibility and speed. With your investment, we can help meet the unmet needs in our community, part of our core mission, in sustained and thoughtful ways, particularly around issues that are systemic, deep-seeded, and complex. While we have no idea what is next in the post-COVID-19  world, we do know that we are ready to rise to new challenges and help the Adirondack region emerge stronger and more resilient than ever.

We have a vision to empower people in the Adirondacks–both seasonal and year-round–to create opportunities to help neighbors and leave the Adirondack Park better than we found it. With your help, we will increase our impact by growing our community and network of diverse and empowered members, increasing our connection to area youth, and building a multi-generational network of people who will be good stewards of the Adirondack Park.

Our current 3-year strategic plan serves as our roadmap to creating and managing even more impactful projects and achieving the goals of our existing project areas.

In the Adirondacks we have a tremendous diversity of skill sets–farmers, telecommuters, environmentalists, teachers, nurses, stay-at-home parents, and many others. These people care about our mission and will help us achieve it. We lay out tangible actions that people can take to “get things done” at home and in their communities. 

Broadband: “100@100”
Enable 100% of households in NY to access to at least 100 Mbps broadband speeds.

Road Salt Project: Champlain Basin Pilot
Work with state and local partners to create a transformative change in winter maintenance practices and build broad support and buy-in through the Clean Waters Safe Roads Partnership, because no one should have to choose between clean water and safe winter roads, and help support action based on the recommendations of the New York State Road Salt Task Force.

Pollinator Project: Significant Pollinator Habitat Expansion
Expand pollinator habitat by distributing free native wildflower seed packets, expanding our annual plant sale impacts, building community-scale pollinator gardens with the Mobile Pollinator Trailer, and enacting wide-spread management changes to large open landscapes, such as capped landfills, septic fields, and roadside habitat in the Adirondacks.  

Food Security Program: Help Low-Income Families Access healthy, local food.
Help small local farms and low-income Adirondack families living in food deserts gain long term physical, economic, and cultural access to healthy local food produced using sustainable practices through our four Food Security Projects: 1) Fair Food Program, 2) Farmacies, 3). Fair Share CSA’s (Community Supported Agriculture) 4) and the “For-The-Community Garden.” project.

Compost for Good: 3-6 Community Composting Sites
Assist 3 Adirondack communities in obtaining community-scale in-vessel composters to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build agricultural soils.

We’re nimble. We’re efficient. We get things done.

We’re not simply a community organization or simply an environmental organization. We take a holistic approach to building sustainable solutions to unmet needs that impact our region. We have a history of excellent work with partners that help to leverage and complement our skills. Our work is non-partisan, non-controversial, and impact driven. An investment in us is an investment in the region you love. 

We will achieve the new strategic goals of AdkAction, accomplish our 3-year goals for our major current projects, and build resilience in our organization so that we can pivot and address the next important unmet needs of our region. We need support to retain our outstanding staff and develop the technological and organizational systems that make our work more efficient and effective. Annual outside support from grants, though growing significantly over the past 3 years, is unpredictable. The assured financial support from the Leadership Circle enables us to plan and support annual project plans no matter the vicissitudes of grant support.