Message from the Executive Director

With the last graduation ceremony at Cazenovia College completed, I, like many of you, have been thinking about what will transpire when the college officially closes its doors. The closing of the college and the re-purposing of the campus will have enormous impacts for our community. Many land trusts, especially those with extensive service areas, cannot or do not participate in planning at the community scale. CPF, on the other hand, has a long history of involvement in community-level planning, perhaps resulting from the organization’s early focus on preserving the historic village. We continue to engage in community-level planning today. In 2022 we worked with the Town of Cazenovia to develop a solar siting toolkit and hosted a series of webinars on emerging issues in commercial solar siting. Currently, we are collaborating with the Cazenovia Area Community Development Association to engage with the community around potential future uses for the Cazenovia College campus. In truth, community-scale planning factors into each conservation project decision that we make.

CPF’s work goes beyond conserving a particular parcel of land or preserving a specific historic building façade. We celebrate the importance of each individual project, but we also must recognize the larger objective. Collectively, these projects keep our community’s “sense of place” intact when change happens, as it will and as it must, in order to ensure that Cazenovia remains a vibrant and thriving community for generations to come. CPF couldn’t do this work without you. Thank you for being a part of this conservation community.