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Our vision and mission

Our vision is for a West Dorset with more wildlife and biodiversity, improved water, air and soil quality, better natural flood management and through natural processes, is tackling the impacts of climate change.  We want to reconnect people with nature, enabling them to as enjoy its wildlife and habitats in all its beauty and diversity.

Our mission is to improve the natural environment and its resilience by collaborating with landowners and managers, regional partners and the local community on projects and approaches which meet our vision.  These will include rewilding schemes, such as reintroductions of native species, regenerative agriculture projects and delivery of education and public awareness projects.  

Our Trustees

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Luke Montagu, Founding trustee and Chair 

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Luke Montagu is an entrepreneur who now spends most of his time managing his family’s estate at Mapperton in West Dorset. After graduating from Columbia University, Luke founded a series of technology, education and media businesses. In 2003 he co-founded the Met Film School, which he led as CEO until 2009.  Luke is the founding member of Secretariat of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence as well as a committee member of the NICE guideline on Safe Prescribing and Withdrawal Management. 

Philip Colfox, Founding Trustee

 

​Philip Colfox owns Symondsbury Estate which has been on a journey over the last 40 years how to migrate from a traditional farming business to a highly diversified lifestyle brand trying to share with everyone the good life, good health, good ambiance and being kind.  Currently converting to regenerative farming with ambitions to “wind the clock right back” on food production, while making farming enjoyable and profitable and trying to develop a new tourism landscape for the 21st and 22nd centuries full of bugs, bees, butterflies, beasts, bushes, bogs and blooms.

Dr Tarsha Finney, Trustee 

 

Tarsha Finney grew up on Wombramurra, her family’s 35,000 acre cattle property, which was an early innovator in Australian regenerative farming practices.  Tarsha is a trained architect and urban designer, with an expertise in city building via large scale housing projects.  She was Visiting Professor in the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art  where she also led the MA City Design undertaking research work in Sydney, Hong Kong and London into new models of intergenerational housing. Over 25 years of teaching, research and practice her work has been driven by questions of shared resources, collective agency, and social and ecological solidarity in the face of climate change and biodiversity collapse.

Others

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We have one further Trustee and a co-opted Trustee, Nick Gray, who was one of the founding Trustees.

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We are also actively recruiting for two more Trustees.  More information can be found here

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