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EXPERTISE
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Land
Management
Designing collaborative processes that help communities, agencies, and land managers work through complex natural resource challenges, align diverse interests, and move toward practical, broadly supported solutions.
Land management decisions often involve competing priorities: protecting ecological systems, supporting recreation and economic activity, respecting cultural values, and responding to community concerns. These issues frequently span multiple jurisdictions, agencies, and stakeholder groups.
CDR Associates helps organizations navigate this complexity through thoughtful process design, skilled facilitation, and inclusive stakeholder engagement. For more than four decades, we have supported collaborative planning efforts related to public lands, outdoor recreation, habitat conservation, watershed management, and land use policy.
Our team works closely with agencies, elected officials, Tribes, nonprofits, landowners, and community members to ensure that planning processes are transparent, credible, and productive. By creating structured opportunities for dialogue and problem solving, we help groups move beyond conflict toward practical strategies that reflect shared interests and can be implemented on the ground.
Outdoor Recreation
Outdoor recreation is central to the identity and economy of many western communities, and to the conflicts that arise when demand outpaces land management capacity. CDR helps agencies, land managers, and communities navigate trail planning, use conflicts, and access questions, bringing together diverse users, adjacent landowners, and managing agencies to find workable solutions that support both recreation and long-term land health.
Parks & Open Space Planning
Parks and open spaces serve many users with often competing expectations. CDR supports municipal, state, and federal park agencies in developing management plans that reflect both operational priorities and community values, spanning open space planning, unit and resource management plans, and engagement processes that bring park neighbors, adjacent communities, and recreation users into planning decisions.
Funding & Grant Strategy
Securing funding for land management and conservation projects increasingly requires more than a strong proposal. It demands coordinated stakeholder input, clearly articulated community priorities, and alignment across partners. CDR supports land management agencies, foundations, and nonprofit organizations in building the collaborative foundations that make grant strategies succeed. This includes facilitating stakeholder engagement processes that inform funding priorities, supporting strategic planning efforts tied to grant cycles, and helping major funders better understand the landscape of partners, needs, and opportunities to improve funding outcomes at scale. CDR recently supported Great Outdoors Colorado (GOCO) in developing its 2025 Strategic and Spending Plan, facilitating stakeholder engagement to shape how the organization directs its conservation and outdoor recreation investments across the state.
Regional Partnerships & Coalitions
Many land management challenges are regional in scale, spanning county lines, agency boundaries, and community interests that don't map onto existing governance structures. CDR helps build and sustain the regional partnerships needed to address them, supporting coalition governance, strategic planning, stakeholder engagement, and grant management. In Colorado, CDR currently supports two of the state's Outdoor Regional Partnerships, helping rural coalitions align conservation and recreation priorities, establish governance, and pursue available funding.
Wildlife & Habitat Connectivity
Wildlife movement across Colorado's landscapes depends on coordinated action across agencies, landowners, Tribes, and transportation authorities. Since its founding in 2018, CDR has facilitated the Colorado Wildlife and Transportation Alliance, a statewide coalition that has become a national model for interagency collaboration on crossing infrastructure, habitat connectivity, and wildlife-vehicle collision reduction. CDR supports the Alliance's governance, consensus-based decision making, strategic planning, and multi-partner engagement across state, federal, Tribal, nonprofit, and local stakeholders.
Forests & Watersheds
Healthy forests and watersheds require coordination across a patchwork of ownerships, jurisdictions, and management objectives. CDR supports cross-boundary planning efforts that bring together federal and state agencies, Tribes, counties, landowners, and conservation organizations to align forest management priorities and advance shared stewardship goals, helping partners move from competing interests to coordinated, landscape-scale action.
Examples
Explore some of our recent Land Management work.
