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Community Connections
Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation is a local land trust, and a land trust is a community organization. Sheriff’s Meadow hopes to make all of its lands an essential part of island life. We hope that our lands play an important role in your life, whether you live on the island, and make walking West Chop Woods part of your daily routine, whether you spend your summers here, or whether you are coming here on vacation or to visit friends. We wish to make all of our lands an integral part of the Martha’s Vineyard community, and we hope that our lands can serve community purposes.
Trails are a primary means of connecting our lands to the community, and Sheriff’s Meadow plans to expand our trail network considerably. To begin with, we will better welcome the public to the properties where the public is already welcome to visit. These open-to-the-public properties are highlighted on this website, and one may simply print out the online trail map to take along when walking the property. These lands will soon be marked by handsome new welcome signs, signs that are attractive and more prominent than those currently in use. We will also take extra care to better maintain our trails. In certain areas, we hope to make trails universally accessible, so that our properties can be enjoyed by those in wheelchairs, those pushing strollers, and those who have difficulty walking.
Sheriff’s Meadow also plans to establish trails on properties that are not yet open to the public, but could be. In 2009, Sheriff’s Meadow plans to open public trails on the Phillips Preserve in Tisbury and the Edgartown Pond Lot in the Katama section of Edgartown. More trails are in the works. We are also working cooperatively with other organizations working to promote trails, including the Martha’s Vineyard land bank and the Vineyard Conservation Society. We hope that our many holdings across Martha’s Vineyard can help create key links in the growing network of cross-town and cross-island trails.
In the years to come, we hope that our lands can help serve our community in many other ways. Perhaps our woodlands could provide forest products for the construction of affordable homes. We can create and maintain scenic roadside views, as we do with our Francis Preserve on Chappaquiddick, and with Nat’s Farm in West Tisbury. We plan to develop an education program in cooperation with island schools, and we hope that students of all ages use our properties as outdoor classrooms. We can continue to allow scientific research to take place on our properties.
We encourage you to contact us with any ideas that you have on how better Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation may connect to the island community.
