Who We Are
The Massachusetts Outdoor Heritage Foundation is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization created and guided by passionate sportsmen and women and conservationists who explore and enjoy the forests, fields, and streams of the Commonwealth throughout the year.
We are hunters, naturalists, and anglers. We believe that all people need to be able to find and access cool streams, open fields, and wooded hillsides, and that the maintenance of these values on a statewide basis provides all of us with the most essential opportunities that modern life can give for personal renewal and sustenance.
See President Wayne MacCallum's article in MassWildlife Magazine "A Foundation for our Heritage"
We are hunters, naturalists, and anglers. We believe that all people need to be able to find and access cool streams, open fields, and wooded hillsides, and that the maintenance of these values on a statewide basis provides all of us with the most essential opportunities that modern life can give for personal renewal and sustenance.
See President Wayne MacCallum's article in MassWildlife Magazine "A Foundation for our Heritage"
Why We Are Here
Despite the best efforts of all the state and private organizations that work so diligently to protect and enhance wildlife habitat in the Commonwealth and around the world, we know that only with the concurrence and commitment of people like you can we as a society hope to maintain what remains of our outdoor heritage, our living legacy.
Indeed, the private individual has always been at the center of wildlife protection in this country, and much more so than in Europe, for example, where most preserves are privately held in the control of wealthy families, including the royal and noble families. On the contrary, in the United States it has always been the personal and collective efforts of individuals that have initiated and supported the only truly sustained conservation efforts in our history. These individuals and groups looked beyond the gratification of the moment and acted selflessly, in the interest of the future of the particular resource, for the ultimate benefit of all of us.
The founders of the Massachusetts Outdoor Heritage Foundation believe that real, sustainable conservation is impossible without the engagement and commitment of individual citizens, the men and women who live and work in the surrounding matrix of rural neighborhoods and small towns, and central to our mission is the desire to enable and foster the continuance of the common person's love for and connection to his or her local natural places, right here in Massachusetts.
Finally, as we work to conserve and protect "nature," it is vital that we recognize "the role of nature not as some thing to be protected, but as the container of all we know and do."¹ Such recognition acknowledges a single human being's very limited capability to gauge and predict the effects of society's collective actions, while it also compels us to acknowledge our utter dependence on healthy, functioning ecosystems and landscape processes. Outdoorspeople, the hunters, naturalists, and hikers among us, have a pivotal role to play in our civilization's current work toward achieving true sustainability and conservation.
¹Tom Robertson, moderator, EnergyResources Group (Yahoo!© groups), email May 22, 2007.
Our Guiding Principles
Massachusetts Outdoor Heritage has a simple, singular goal: to guarantee that the vital connection and the personal renewal we all experience in our Commonwealth's great remaining wildlife lands and natural areas will endure and continue to delight and sustain us and our descendants forever. In particular, the foundation's board of directors seeks to provide expertise and funding for projects that will:
We work to create cooperative partnerships to find and fund the best wild lands and wildlife projects directly and provide pivotal collaboration by assisting without duplicating the exemplary efforts of our sister environmental organizations and our state wildlife agency, the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife (MassWildlife).
Sportsmen and naturalists who donate to the Massachusetts Outdoor Heritage Foundation are confident that their gifts and bequests to benefit wildlife and rare and endangered species will not be diverted to other unrelated or even contradictory purposes in time of fiscal crisis in the Commonwealth.
Donors also know, given the foundation's close working relationship with MassWildlife, that the projects and research we sponsor or contribute toward are based on rock-solid science, rigorously applied. At the same time, our independent status allows the Massachusetts Outdoor Heritage Foundation to be more nimble than MassWildlife, acting faster and at a finer scale than is always practical or possible for a large state agency.
- conduct surveys and research to inventory and prioritize our most imperiled landscapes
- reach out to children and citizens
- manage protected lands to restore and maintain habitats for our native species of animals and plants
- provide all ages with informative nature, sporting, and biodiversity education programs that engage and bring them out into the natural world.
We work to create cooperative partnerships to find and fund the best wild lands and wildlife projects directly and provide pivotal collaboration by assisting without duplicating the exemplary efforts of our sister environmental organizations and our state wildlife agency, the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife (MassWildlife).
Sportsmen and naturalists who donate to the Massachusetts Outdoor Heritage Foundation are confident that their gifts and bequests to benefit wildlife and rare and endangered species will not be diverted to other unrelated or even contradictory purposes in time of fiscal crisis in the Commonwealth.
Donors also know, given the foundation's close working relationship with MassWildlife, that the projects and research we sponsor or contribute toward are based on rock-solid science, rigorously applied. At the same time, our independent status allows the Massachusetts Outdoor Heritage Foundation to be more nimble than MassWildlife, acting faster and at a finer scale than is always practical or possible for a large state agency.
Board Members
Wayne MacCallum (President) of Grafton, retired Director, Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife
Dr. Richard H. Peters (Vice President) of West Newbury, Executive Chairman, TellBio, Inc
Bob Durand of Marlborough, Durand and Anastas, Environmental Strategies; former Secretary, Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs
Brian Beaton of Shrewsbury, Partner, Beaton and Petersen, Attorneys at Law
Joseph Trainor (Treasurer) of Chelmsford and Greenfield, retired Appellate Court Judge
Mark Tisa (Clerk) of Princeton, Director, Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife
Walter Bickford of Berlin, former Commissioner, Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game
Jack Buckley of Hopkinton, retired Director, Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife
Ernest W. Foster of Worcester, President, Ernest W. Foster Companies
Ellie Horwitz of Concord, retired Chief of Information and Education, Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife
James Kane of Shrewsbury, President of A.D. Makepeace Company
Mary Lee King of Hudson, former Deputy Commissioner, Department of Fish and Game
Dave Peters of Charlton, former Commissioner, Department of Fish and Game
Stephen Sears of Dalton, President, The Stationery Factory
In Memoriam:
Stephen Quill of Lancaster
Sally Bell of Lenox
Brad Gage of Amherst
George Darey of Lenox
Garrett Hollands of Boylston
With coordination assistance from:
Ralph Taylor of Shutesbury
Donate to Preserve
Do your part to conserve and restore wildlife habitat in Massachusetts, for today and the future.