Joshua S. Reichert on the Pew Environment Group

Joshua S. Reichert

Managing Director, Pew Environment Group

The Pew Charitable Trusts

In January 2008, the National Environmental Trust (NET) merged with the Pew Environment Group. These two organizations bring similar policy and advocacy skills to the work of protecting the world’s natural heritage. The consolidated team, with an annual budget of more than $70 million and a staff of 80, is one of the largest U.S. environmental organizations. Tracing its roots to 1994, NET was started by Pew and others to assist the national advocacy efforts of the environmental community.

Marshall Ledger spoke with the Pew Environment Group’s managing director, Joshua S. Reichert, Ph.D., to describe the recent merger.

Questions and Answers

Question

What was occurring in the early 1990s that made the establishment of NET both necessary and desirable?

Answer

That was a period when opponents of environmental causes were improving the effectiveness of their efforts by hiring political consultants and sophisticated public relations specialists. They often succeeded in framing issues and related political debate to suit their own interests—remember “jobs versus owls.” The resulting discussion was neither balanced nor accurate.

The environmental community needed to do a better job at ensuring that its message and point of view were fairly heard. Americans craved clarity and balanced information on the issues, and still do, because they don’t want to stand by and allow the continued destruction of the nation’s forests, coastal waters and marine life, our water supply and the quality of our air, among many other things.  

At the same time, Pew’s environmental campaign work, which then was primarily aimed at protecting critical forest and wilderness habitat in the western United States, had to be reinvented with each campaign. We, as a foundation at the time, had to ask each successive grantee to create the infrastructure needed for effective communications and media work, grassroots organizing and legislative advocacy. It was far more efficient to build an organization that was singularly capable of doing this kind of work on a multitude of issues.

Question

What are some of the issues NET was involved in?

Answer

It was instrumental in the successful passage of the nation’s strongest drinking-water and food-quality protection acts, in preventing passage of amendments that would have weakened the Endangered Species Act, in managing the defense of the Roadless Rule, in helping to strengthen the nation’s principal marine fisheries law, the Magnuson-Stevens Act, and in playing a central role in building support for adoption of the Kyoto Protocol.

Question

What has been NET’s impact on the environment community itself?

Answer

Over the past decade or more, many environmental organizations have become more effective in communicating their perspective to policy makers, the public and the media, and some of that positive change has been influenced by NET’s work.

Question

How did NET accomplish that?

Answer

It built a broad nationwide network of relationships with environment, public health, energy and political writers, and this is why you find the NET staff cited frequently in the print media.

Its editorial team formed relationships with more than 125 newspapers and essentially constructed a model for editorial communications—which is an all-too-often neglected area for the nonprofit sector.

NET’s government-relations group earned a reputation for being highly bipartisan and effective. They built a team of individuals with long Capitol Hill experience, who had working relationships with policy makers of all ideological hues. Also, the field team developed a presence in nearly half the states and in every major region of the country.

Question

What made the merger appropriate for Pew?

Answer

When Pew became a public charity four years ago, we gained the ability to operate policy campaigns directly. As a result, we had the opportunity to dramatically increase the scope and impact of our work.

But we also realized that we would have to increase our personnel across a wide range of areas and bring on staff with proficiency in communications and media, government affairs and field operations.

There were two ways to build this capacity: buy it—hire the people we needed, one by one—or acquire it. Namely, bring inside Pew the organization that we had helped create specifically for the purpose of running and managing campaigns in areas in which we were working.

Given that NET contained the people that we needed, that it had effectively run advocacy campaigns for many years, that it had worked primarily in the areas in which our work was focused and that we had had a close and extremely productive working relationship for more than a decade, this was a relatively easy choice.

Question

And what made it desirable for NET?

Answer

Just as it was in our case, I think that the level of trust and comfort, built over many years of collaboration with us, was a significant factor in NET’s decision. The staff of both organizations not only worked closely together, but shared common goals and had skill sets and professional backgrounds that complemented one another.

Second, a merger offered the staff of NET the potential of greatly expanding the scope and scale of its work, its geographical range, resource base and long-term effectiveness.

Question

Where does the new Environment Group go from here?

Answer

I genuinely believe that we have reached a critical moment in our history with the natural world. For years, scientists have been warning of the potentially devastating impacts of human activity on the Earth’s terrestrial and marine environment as well as the global atmosphere.

The good news is there is a growing sense of urgency that has gripped the public, and governments throughout the world are waking up to the problems we face. We have a rather narrow window of time to address these problems and a corresponding opportunity to reverse course and begin to more sensibly manage our relationship with nature. Quite simply, this merger will make us more effective at doing that.