Reliance on nonprofits to fund local parks and land conservation can mean unequal access to public lands across US counties

In this journal article, author Cadence Willse investigated the impact of widespread funding cuts in US local governments and public agencies for the upkeep of public parks and the support of local land conservation. Instead, many counties rely on large “support nonprofits,” which are charities that use voluntary contributions of money, property, and services to protect parks and natural systems. Willse paired data about large nonprofits with data about the counties they serve in order to see the impact of this reliance, in terms of equity and access across communities.

For her analysis, Willse pulled together descriptive statistics on US counties that contained one or more support nonprofits focused on public parks and conservation. This allowed her to test for any associations between these large nonprofits and county socioeconomic status and demographic characteristics. She also examined the relationship between the presence of nonprofits and the share of the vote in favor of land conservation. She used data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics, which provided a sample of nonprofits dedicated to philanthropic support of parks, natural resources, and land conservation from 2000 to 2015. To examine the relevant aspects of counties with large support nonprofits, she matched them to county characteristics, using several different US Census surveys and estimates. Additionally, she measured the percent of land protected by conservation trusts, using the National Land Trust Census. To look at the relationship between support nonprofits and political advocacy, she included data from the LandVote Database. And to control for county partisan composition, Willse accessed data from ICPSR in the form of the National Neighborhood Data Archive (NaNDA): Voter Registration, Turnout, and Partisanship by County, United States, 2004-2018 (ICPSR 38506). This study contains counts of voter registration and voter turnout for all counties in the US for the years 2004-2018. It also contains measures of each county’s Democratic and Republican partisanship, including six-year longitudinal partisan indices for 2006-2016. Constructed from several election and voter turnout datasets, this study was created to explore the relationship between voter engagement (as expressed through registration and turnout rates), partisan political leanings, community health, and public policy.

Willse’s analysis ended up highlighting “how nonprofit philanthropy and mobilization shapes access to public land and conservation efforts.” Among her findings: “counties in metropolitan areas with well-educated liberal residents are more likely to have a support nonprofit fundraising for public land,” and “counties with support nonprofits are more likely to pass ballot initiatives funding public land conservation.”