Open call for Land Trust board members

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, March 18, 2026

Over the past 35 years, the Vashon-Maury Island Land Trust has worked to protect almost three thousand acres of Vashon’s wild and working lands. As we (the Board of Directors and Staff) look to the future, our vision now is to increase access to those lands for both people and wildlife (marine and earthly).

Towards that effort, we’ve launched a new initiative to engage more with our neighbors, seek out the voices of current islanders, and collaborate in a more meaningful way with the Puyallup Tribe of Indians who have ancestral and treaty rights in this place and its waters.

While the Land Trust board is passionate and committed with a strong sense of camaraderie and joint purpose, like many other organizations on Vashon, we are also an aging and increasingly homogeneous group.

We recognize that we would benefit from the addition of fresh viewpoints and people with diverse backgrounds and hope that an open call for board candidates will widen our circle. We especially want to include more participants who may not have always felt that they had a seat at the table.

We’ve been working closely with tribal fisheries experts who provided the eggs for this experiment. The Puyallup Tribal Council has also approved joint grant applications to other agencies for promising comanagement projects.

If the work of caring for our island’s lands and waters is inspiring to you, please check out our website at vashonlandtrust.org. It has a user-friendly channel to apply in this process, so you can tell us what experience, ideas and perspectives you would bring to this effort.

If you currently don’t have access to a computer or if yours is being ornery, feel free to pick up or drop off a hard copy at our office just a block west of Vashon’s main intersection on Bank Road.

We hope to fill three seats in this round and are eager to hear from you; to hear how you might help advance our mission and shape our future priorities and policies.

We hope to receive applications within the next three weeks and will begin reviewing candidates after April 10. Thank you for taking the time to consider and respond to this opportunity.

Kris Olson is the vice president of the Vashon-Maury Island Land Trust Board of Directors.