History

The Six Rivers Initiative and its greater people, the Six Rivers Strategic Alliance is a voluntary member association of community members, professional service providers, private working-lands resource property landowners and experienced manager representatives that have joined together to further the common goals expressed in the Initiative’s vision and mission. The By-Law’s set forth the Initiative's basic organizational structure, its membership and the description of the primary strategic objectives to be marked in furtherance of the Initiate's mission:  which is solely to achieve the vision.

Based on the conservation successes of Six Rivers to the Sea (SixRS), SixRS was a grassroots farmer-led conservation easement (CE) USDA funding strategy. Fundraising for the SixRS Project between the 2000 and 2009 was successful primarily due to its intelligently balanced working landscape conservation strategies, landscape scope, and that its region-wide project tracts were contractually bound to cooperation. Once, competing tracts not contractually obligated to procedural cooperation began using the project name and altering the working agriculture CE term parameters, that project's lack of framework caused its collapse.

The genesis of both SixRS and this new grassroots Initiative is observance of the epoch loss of sustainable agriculture in the Initiative's economically and ecologically connected bio-region. The observance is regarding rapid conversion of ownership or land control from agricultural families to public bureaucracy and corporate acquisitions, or low-density sub-division. All of these types of conversions are contributing to the consequential loss of husbandry and stewardship, and the resulting degradation of stewardship of public revenues, degradation of rich cultures as well as efficient and productive economies, and rich and productive ecologies. These three (culture, economy and ecology) when in perfect balance constitute the triad of community resilience, community connection and potential for self-governance. Without that balance, observe the root of all hardship and strife.