How Trust for Public Land Helps Save the Bees
Project Hive Pet Company has a mission to save the bees. While we do this primarily through our partnership with 1% for the Planet—donating 1% of gross sales to plant healthy wildflower habitat, we also use our voices to help advocate for the effort. Thankfully, we’re not the only ones who understand how essential bees and other pollinators are to our food supply and overall livelihood. We’ve written about the great work Pollinator Partnership, Xerces Society, and the Minnesota Bee Lab are all doing. But there are more!
I am thrilled to learn (and share) that Trust for Public Land, an organization I served on the Minnesota Advisory Board for over a decade, is incorporating pollinator-related work into their community schoolyard projects, trails and parks work, and large-scale land acquisition.
What is Trust for Public Land?
Founded in 1972, Trust for Public Land is a nonprofit organization that understands how important it is for everyone’s health and well-being to be able to experience and enjoy the outdoors. That’s why their work revolves around creating and protecting land for people. Their broad ranging work spans urban and rural lands: they help create parks and trails, protect forests, and build greener schoolyards. But they don’t do it alone; they have many local, state, and national partners and lend their expertise to get the job done—often under the radar. Here’s hoping more people know this fantastic group!
One of the coolest things about TPL’s work is their ParkScore® rating. They review and rank the nation’s 100 most populous U.S. Cities and compare it across five categories: accessibility, investment, amenities, equity, and acreage. (You can learn more about their methodology here.) What’s the best city for dog parks? In 2024, Washington, DC, was ranked #1! Our hometown of Minneapolis was #2, and our Twin City of St. Paul was #3!
Speaking of rankings, did you know that this is all publicly available information? You can check out your city’s park ranking by amenity—and one of them includes off-leash dog parks! According to the 2024 rankings of dog parks per capita, Boise, Idaho, is the number one city! Here are the top ten.
It should be noted that New York City has a whopping 158 dog parks, but it is ranked #36 since their population is almost 8.7 million people.
What is Trust for Public Land’s impact on pollinators?
I recently met with Sara Shaw Meyer, Trust for Public Land’s Minnesota Director of Philanthropy, and asked her that very question. She explains, “While we can’t fully calculate the exact impact, here are a few examples of our pollinator-related work across the country to give you a better sense of the scope and impact of our efforts.” Below, we share a sampling of what she told me—five different types of projects across five states, all helping pollinators!
Minnesota
Trust for Public Land’s Minnesota Community Schoolyard program is a brilliant idea: use existing public schoolyards and playgrounds and make them publicly accessible outside of school hours. This initiative reimagines what schoolyards could be and helps transform them into greener, healthier, safe places for people to enjoy the outdoors. Pollinator gardens are part of this transformation.
New York
Trust for Public Land in New York has taken on the bold and beautiful endeavor to connect the nation’s longest multi-use state trail, the Empire State Trail, to the people of Long Island. The Long Island Greenway’s long-term goal is to have regular pollinator gardens along the entire 200-mile stretch, providing pollinators with an extensive, much-needed network of habitat with food and shelter in a very developed and dense region. You can read more in Land & People Magazine (see page 40).
Colorado
Trust for Public Land works closely with states and municipalities to pass ballot measures that support funding for parks and land conservation. In the November 2024 election, in “an impressive demonstration of bipartisan support for the environment,” voters approved ballot measures championed by TPL totaling over $16 billion. Here’s a list of all the measures, but one to highlight is in Colorado’s Eagle County. The ballot measure will “Restore and protect forest and grassland health to reduce the risk of wildfires; maintain the health of rivers and streams and ensure adequate water supplies; support more efficient water use; conserve native bird, fish, and wildlife populations; restore habitat for pollinators.” Kudos!
Texas
In central Texas, where habitat has been lost due to development, Trust for Public Land has helped to conserve thousands of acres for the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge. The bulk of the land restoration took place almost a decade ago. The article describes, “Volunteers have pitched in to restore pollinator-friendly meadows within the refuge, collecting native plant seeds in the fall and planting them in the spring. When the plantings take root, migrating monarchs will find fields bursting with nectar-rich wildflowers for resting and laying eggs. A new ‘pollinator trail’ near the refuge’s headquarters offers visitors a chance to wander through a restored meadow abuzz with hard-working birds and insects.”
Georgia
Birds Georgia is a nonprofit organization “dedicated to building places where birds and people thrive.” In partnership with Trust for Public Land, in 2024 they completed the installation of a pollinator garden of native plants at McIntosh Reserve in Carroll County. It’s the last stop on the Camp & Paddle Trail along the Chattahoochee River—a fitting ending to a beautiful trail!
Land conservation is so much more than preserving land for people to enjoy. As Trust for Public Land demonstrates, there are so many additional benefits: cleaner water, cleaner air, climate mitigation, and, importantly, healthy habitat for our vital pollinators. The more I learn about Trust for Public Land’s great projects, the more inspired I am by this amazing team!
