Endowment Campaign
To ensure the long-term vitality of the Galisteo Basin Preserve’s open spaces and trails, we have a rare opportunity to create a permanent endowment—with your help.
With the support of our community and Thaw Charitable Trust, a permanent endowment will deepen Commonweal’s land conservation and stewardship practice.
WHAT?
To ensure the preserve remains a beautiful, ecologically rich, community-serving open space and trails network, Commonweal Conservancy is fundraising to establish a permanent endowment that will help underwrite the organization’s on-going stewardship and program management responsibilities.
Although annual fundraising has largely supported the organization’s operations and programming over the past few years, to advance its regional conservation ambitions along with a diverse portfolio of community-serving educational programs, a more substantial and secure base of operational funding is required.
To ensure Commonweal is strongly positioned to steward the preserve in the coming decades, the Thaw Charitable Trust has pledged to donate $1.0M toward a Galisteo Basin Preserve permanent endowment if Commonweal can raise $1.5M as a match before September 28, 2028.
Conservatively invested, a $2.5M endowment is expected to generate approximately $125,000 per year. With a projected annual budget of $250-300,000 beginning in fiscal year 2026, the endowment’s investment earnings – coupled with other fundraising and program revenues – will allow the organization to bolster its staffing and professional capabilities.
WHY?
Over the past two decades, Commonweal Conservancy has facilitated the acquisition and permanent protection of nearly 12,000 acres of scenic, culturally significant, open space and recreation land in the Galisteo Basin. Through a unique practice of conservation-based community development, the organization financed its operations through land sales to conservation-oriented private buyers, property conveyances to public agencies, and the sale of conservation easement tax credits, coupled with grants and private fundraising.
After suffering nine years of recession – a period of regional economic decline that threatened the organization’s survival – Commonweal redressed its financial obligations and recapitalized its operations in 2018 with a $5.0 philanthropic investment from the Thaw Charitable Trust, along with nearly $700,000 in donations from other major donors.
As a condition of the Thaw Charitable Trust’s investment, Commonweal overlaid the preserve’s open spaces and trail network with fully restrictive conservation easements. These voluntarily donated, legally enforceable land use restrictions guaranteed the property’s permanent protection, but precluded Commonweal’s ability to fund its operations from future conservation land sales.
While Commonweal’s conservation goals for the preserve were well-served by the Thaw Charitable Trust, the organization’s business model – one that combined land transaction revenue with fundraising – was largely constrained to traditional community-based fundraising. Although Commonweal’s fundraising has been successful to the point of recapitalizing the organization, revenues from donations only support a modest stewardship program and operating capability.
To advance a more ambitious and sustaining agenda of community engagement, facility development and land stewardship, Commonweal must grow and diversify its financial resources.
Securing the Thaw Charitable Trust’s matching grant and establishing a $2.5M endowment will allow Commonweal to move beyond triage-based stewardship, to a conservation practice that enhances the preserve’s larger ecological health and vitality, and improves its recreational values, as well as extends the organization’s reach to conserve other significant properties within the Galisteo Basin watershed.
HOW?
Beginning in early winter of 2024, Commonweal made outreach to a select group of local philanthropists to solicit their support for the endowment. Between February and January 2025, Commonweal attracted donations and pledges totaling more than $650,000 toward it’s $1.5M endowment fundraising goal. Between February-June 2025, Commonweal will continue to advance the “quiet phase” of the campaign with the goal of raising an additional $350,000 in major donor gifts.
In July 2025, staff will make outreach to the larger Santa Fe community to secure the balance of its $1.5M endowment challenge. If Commonweal’s plans and timelines can be successfully achieved, the organization anticipates fulfilling its endowment fundraising responsibilities by December 31, 2025. With a $1.0M grant from the Thaw Charitable Trust, the $2.5M endowment is expected to be further enhanced with bequests that are anticipated to manifest within the next 5-10 years. Over time, Commonweal believes that an endowment of $3.5-4.0M will provide meaningful underwriting for its land stewardship, community programming, and regional conservation work.
The wide-open spaces, trails, wildlife habitat, cultural resources, and community-serving programs that distinguish the Galisteo Basin Preserve can only be sustained and enhanced with the generous support of people like you.
Your gift to the Galisteo Basin Preserve permanent endowment will be celebrated for generations: a gift that will be powerfully leveraged and yield priceless dividends... forever!