Welcome to the 2007 Fall Retreat:
20th Anniversary

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Environmental Grantmakers Association at Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico.  The Retreat offers us the opportunity to connect with each other and with the extraordinary New Mexico terrain.  We hope you’ll find inspiration and rejuvenation at the Hyatt Tamaya, located between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, set alongside the Rio Grande River among the cottonwood trees. 

New Mexico is a state of contrasts, which we hope to explore at the Retreat.  Its temperate zones range from alpine to desert, and breathtakingly beautiful landscapes are coupled with urban sprawl. New Mexico boasts one of the richest per capita income counties in the country, as well as several of the poorest. The world’s most modern businesses, including high tech companies and nuclear weapons complexes, exist side-by-side with cultures more than 10,000 years old. English, Spanish, Tewa, Keres and Diné are all spoken. The pre-Retreat trips offer excellent opportunities to explore the full range of environmental issues and projects in the state, including guided trips to the Petroglyph Monument, the Mexican border and sustainable farms in northern New Mexico.

This is an exciting time to come together as environmental grantmakers.  The last several years marked a long, dark period for the environmental movement, and we’ve emerged over the last year as if from a tunnel into the bright light.  There are unprecedented levels of public support for environmental issues, environmental champions have assumed new prominence at the state and national levels, and issues like global warming have made their way into the Academy Awards and onto magazine covers.  While we face unprecedented challenges, now is the ideal time to seize the moment and secure real and lasting protections.

As you know, this year marks the 20th Anniversary of EGA, and we have crafted a program that will help us reflect on the last twenty years of our community’s work and plan together for the next two decades.  We’d like to thank the members of the Program Committee, all of whom put and enormous amount of work into creating a program that reflects the broad interests of the EGA community.  The Host Committee worked incredibly hard to incorporate New Mexican work and culture into this Retreat, and we thank them.  Lastly, hats off to the EGA staff who have worked tirelessly to support all aspects of the process to create this Retreat!