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54 any effort to make their activities more responsive to conservation concerns can only benefit them in the public's eye. Having said this however, actually bringing people together with these common interest has taken quite a bit of work. 2. Local Presence The Conservancy established a local project manager on the Yarnpa because it recognized that the only way to develop working partnerships was to bave someone working at the community level. Building trust with key community leaders and landowners is clearly the key to the whole program, and as anyone who has worked at the local level knows, this takes an extraordinary amount of time. There is nothing that replaces meeting with people individually around the coffee table. While public meetings and presentations are necessary, building individual personal connections has proved by far the most effective tool to bringing people together on the Yarnpa. The Yarnpa project is still young, so I would rather draw on the Farmington and the Westfield rivers as the best proof of the time it takes to facilitate a collaborative process among private landowners. Pbil Huffman spent over 7 years working on the Farmington and Chris Curtis over 9 years on the WestfIeld to bring those efforts to successful closure. Tim Palmer, who we all know so well as the bistorian of the river conservation movement, claims that simply putting one river activist in every watershed of the country would reap major benefit for the river conservation movement. Many of the existing successes can be traced to this simple fact 3. Local Advisory Committee One of the things we realize after a year of being on the Yampa was that to really engage local leaders in a conservation program, we had to have their direct participation in the decision making process. As a result, we have put together a Local Advisory Committee to advise us on all aspects of our work. This committee includes diverse representation from key affected interests, including ranching, mining, urban development, government resource agencies and conservation. Putting this group together bas been the most important thing we have done to date. It quickly gave our efforts a legitimacy it had not had before, and allowed us to develop projects that integrate with key community needs. The committee has created a dialogue that has educated us all, and helped to make our work actually more effective. 4. Project Timing and Responsiveness Having the patience to hold off on taking any action until we had built a consensus has proven pivotal to gaining support for the projects we are now doing. As Will Murray from the Conservancy's Western Regional OffIce often says, "you bave to go slow to go fast." Once we built a consensus on the type of projects we could conduct, we then moved full speed ahead. On the Yarnpa, our keystone project is the pending acquisition of the Carpenter Ranch, a 1,000 acre river property the Conservancy plans to continue running as a working ranch to demonstrate how ranching and the conservation of biological diversity can be achieved together. Through research on compatible grazing systems, we hope to develop new practices that can be used in other areas within the valley . We also see it as an excellent facility for public education, which our committee members have told us is the most effect we can have. American River Management Society