Description
The Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) promotes coordination of NRCS conservation activities with partners that offer value-added contributions to expand our collective ability to address on-farm, watershed, and regional natural resource concerns. Through RCPP, NRCS seeks to co-invest with partners to implement projects that demonstrate innovative solutions to conservation challenges and provide measurable improvements and outcomes tied to the resource concerns they seek to address.
Key aspects of the program include:
• Partner contributions: Partners are responsible for identifying any combination of cash and in-kind value-added contributions to leverage NRCS’s RCPP investments.
• Innovation: NRCS seeks projects that integrate multiple conservation approaches, implement innovative conservation approaches or technologies, build new partnerships, or effectively take advantage of program flexibilities to deliver conservation solutions.
• Partnerships and management: Partners must have experience, expertise, and capacity to manage the partnership and project, provide outreach to producers, and quantify the environmental (and when possible, economic and social) outcomes of an RCPP project.
• Historically underserved producers: NRCS gives priority consideration to RCPP proposals that propose meaningful and measurable engagement with and benefit to historically underserved farmers, ranchers, and landowners.
Some of the eligible activities under this program include:
• Land management and restoration
• Entity-held easements
• Public works and watershed projects
• Land rental activities