What do you want Adams County to look like in five, ten, or twenty years, and what are you doing to help make that possible?
The South Mountain Partnership (SMP), a public-private partnership and network collaboration, is helping answer these questions.
“We are the only local conservation group operating on a regional level that brings agricultural, historical, natural resource, and recreational departments together several times a year to learn, build networks, and keep in touch when they’re not together,” said SMP Director Katie Hess.
SMP sponsors conservation projects, programs, and meetings, as well as a grant program for interested donors to access necessary resources. “Our mission is to protect and preserve the landscape resources of the South Mountain region, encompassing Adams, Cumberland, Franklin, and York County,” said SMP Program Manager Julia Chain.
The South Mountain region is designated as a “conservation landscape” by the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR).
Since its founding in 2006 with a focus on outdoor recreational work and environment conservation, SMP has preserved the area’s historical, cultural, and agricultural traditions.
“What’s unique about SMP is the network dynamic where we have so many unique partners involved in the mission,” said Chain. “Our primary audience includes people working directly with us and therefore aware of the issue. But we are trying to expand our circle with more people whose interests align with our mission. We are excited to meet and share our projects with more groups of folks by going out and directly meeting them in community gatherings.”
In 2019, SMP embarked on a four-year State of the Region project. The project engages nonprofit organizations, county planning agencies, and decision-makers (municipalities and township planning commissions) and implements recommendations from the project itself. The report was recently shared as a “report card” on the region.
SMP is taking recommendations to start new projects. Examples include a cultural resource inventory of historical resources, implementing wildlife corridors to help species when they migrate north, and focusing on building retail trails.
Hess believes there is room for their projects to improve the region, but there is much work to reach that point. “The SMP framework is intentional for identifying needs and building project scope that depends on local input. We assess local needs and design projects accordingly – but can do better to reach people who can’t access those circles. We are trying to work through the limitations,” she said.
“But working in an emerging field of specialized landscape conservation is not easy. We say we value our history but don’t often conserve it. Historical resources contribute to the idea of a sense of place, which is integral to landscape conservation as a practice. A sense of place is not only a geographical place but a community, how people relate to it, and how it helps create bonds. In the US, conservation does not immediately include historical and cultural sites like other countries do, but we need to do our part in keeping in touch with our roots.”
“As a conservation network, we do not judge success on traditional, quantifiable, conservation matrices; we are more interested in matrices that capture our social impact and our ability to share and strengthen partners’ knowledge in the expertise and our economic impact,” said Hess.
“We embrace competing interests in the sense that we try to celebrate others’ success. It is rarely a competitive feeling in our region – there are so many important things to do in the conservation field, and we can only do some of them. So, we are really happy to have other folks pushing forward,” said Chain.
Although SMP is primarily funded by the DCNR, it encourages action from residents. “Adams County could be feeling a lot of development pressure from Maryland. It is not always a done deal. People need to get involved and have a voice in the community and there are plenty of opportunities,” said Chain.
To follow SMP’s work, visit this link below to access their bi-monthly newsletters. https://www.southmountainpartnership.org/newsletters/ .
To get involved with SMP, https://www.southmountainpartnership.org/get-involved/volunteer/ has information on what you could do on your part. There are multiple gradients of involvement; it is not an all-or-nothing role. SMP members are more than happy to invite people sharing a passion for supporting an important cause.
Aahana Rajbhandari, intern, is a Sophomore at Gettysburg College from Kathmandu, Nepal. She is a Political Science major with a minor in English Writing. She works as a writer and co-editor for the Opinions section of the college newspaper, the Gettysburgian, and is a campus ambassador for the Women’s Network. Aahana is an avid reader and enjoys writing in her free time.