A Legacy That Grows: The Hunter Parks Conservation Fellowship at ACR

Green Assets · April 20, 2023

ACR and Green Assets have established the Hunter Parks Conservation Fellowship, carrying our founder's vision into the next generation of forest carbon professionals.

Some legacies are written in stone. Hunter's is written in forests.

This year, the American Carbon Registry (ACR), a nonprofit enterprise of Winrock International, established the Hunter Parks Conservation Fellowship in honor of our founder, colleague, and dear friend. Created jointly with Green Assets, the Fellowship carries Hunter's name and, more importantly, his vision into the next generation of forest carbon professionals. For everyone at Green Assets, it's a reminder that Hunter's vision isn't behind us, it's ahead of us.

Who Hunter Was

Hunter Parks founded Green Assets in 2009 with a simple but powerful vision: Landowners deserve the opportunity to bring environmental & economic value to their property through conservation. As a landowner himself, Hunter personally understood the questions, hesitations, and hopes that come with land stewardship, and he built Green Assets to be the trustworthy partner he wished every landowner had.

That's where our motto comes from: Landowners Working With Landowners. It wasn't just a line for Hunter, it was a true testimony to how he lived. His passion for conservation was evident in everything he did, from walking a property with a client to championing integrity in a young and rapidly developing carbon market.

When Hunter passed in 2022, we lost a founder, a mentor, and a pioneer in the forest carbon industry. What we didn't lose was his vision, and the Fellowship ensures the industry never will either.

What the Fellowship Is

The Hunter Parks Conservation Fellowship at ACR is a two-year position awarded on a competitive basis to a recent forestry graduate. The Fellow works day-to-day alongside ACR's forestry and carbon market experts, gaining hands-on experience in the evaluation of forest carbon project design and implementation, supporting the ongoing work to conserve, sustainably manage, and restore forestlands across the United States.

In ACR's words, the Fellowship seeks a candidate who embodies “Hunter's passion for conservation, of exploring the unknown, and ensuring landowners get a fair, sustainable deal when participating in the carbon market, while promoting quality and integrity.”

Why It Matters to Us

Hunter believed the carbon market could only work if it worked for landowners: fairly, transparently, and sustainably. He also believed in opening doors for people who shared that conviction.

With this Fellowship, every Fellow who passes through the program will carry a piece of Hunter's approach into the industry, that rigor paired with humility, ambition grounded in integrity, and an unshakeable belief that conservation and opportunity belong together. That ripple effect, one Fellow, to another and another, is exactly the kind of legacy Hunter would have wanted.

For our team, seeing Hunter's name attached to a program dedicated to growing the next generation of forest carbon leaders is humbling and deeply fitting. He spent his career investing in people and in the land, this Fellowship simply continues the work.

Carrying the Vision Forward

At Green Assets, Hunter's vision still guides everything we do. We continue to develop projects, programs, and methodologies that meet the goals of landowners while strengthening integrity in the marketplace.

We're grateful to ACR and Winrock International for honoring our founder in such a meaningful way, and we look forward to watching the Fellowship grow in the years ahead.

Hunter always said the best conservation work outlasts the people who start it. Once again, he was right.

To learn more about the Hunter Parks Fellowship you can visit ACR's website.