The Strategy Director for Protection and Stewardship for The Nature Conservancy’s Nevada Chapter applies the best available science, combining biodiversity and climate-related data, to inform the Chapter’s strategy and agenda for the protection of lands and waters in Nevada. The Strategy Director reports to the Conservation Director and engages with their colleagues to ensure protection efforts advance the Chapter’s conservation agenda and support the Chapter’s broader initiatives (Resilient Lands, Resilient Waters, and Climate Action). To that end, the Strategy Director works to build public and private support for our protection agenda by demonstrating how our agenda and priorities align with stakeholder interests (e.g., sustainable ecosystem services to support communities, alignment with 30X30 goals) and works with the Director of External Affairs to develop public policy and funding sources to support the agenda and priorities, while working with the Director of Development to develop private funding sources. In directly pursuing protection opportunities, it will be necessary for the Strategy Director to engage with landowners, local communities, and agency partners and to negotiate, sometimes complex, deals with landowners for fee title acquisition or conservation easement acquisitions or donations.

The Strategy Director manages the Chapter’s preserves and conservation easements to demonstrate conservation solutions to environmental and social problems that can deliver meaningful outcomes for nature and that can be exported to other private and public lands and scaled to have greater conservation outcomes than possible through TNC’s acquisition and stewardship actions alone. The Strategy Director leads and manages the Chapter’s stewardship team, which is responsible for project development and implementation on the Chapter’s land interests, as well as day-to-day management activities on the preserves. It is also important for the Strategy Director to work toward optimizing our capacity for managing and monitoring our dispersed land interests through measures like best management practices and applied technology.

• Leads and manages the Nevada Chapter’s Protection and Stewardship Strategies and Stewardship Team to produce tangible, lasting conservation results.
• Recruits, manages, and develops a talented, diverse, and high-performing team of conservation professionals and supervises staff at remote locations.
• Coordinates and collaborates with leaders of other functions in the Chapter, such as Conservation Science, External Affairs, Marketing and Development, and with initiatives of the broader organization, to ensure Chapter and organizational-level alignment on priorities and efforts.
• Establishes and maintains optimal performance standards within budget.
• Frequently makes independently strategic decision based on analysis, ambiguous information, and context.
• Negotiates land and water transactions (fee title and conservation easements) and complex agreements, sometimes in a political environment.
• Manages financial, legal, and reputational risks to the organization.
• Collaborates to raise funds to support TNC priorities, including assisting in the management of donor and agency relationships and in the development of fundraising proposals.
• May travel frequently domestically and work some evening and weekend hours.
• May work in variable weather conditions, at remote locations, on difficult and hazardous terrain, and under physically demanding circumstances.