Feldman (Esther) and Community Conservation Solutions records, 1984-2022

Summary

Title:

Esther Feldman and Community Conservation Solutions records

Dates:

1984-2022

Creators:

Feldman, Esther and Community Conservation Solutions

Abstract:

The Esther Feldman and Community Conservation Solutions records document the work conducted by Esther Feldman and/or Community Conservation Solutions (CCS) from the 1980s through 2020. The collection focuses on two major subject areas: (i) ballot measures and campaigns creating public financing for park and conservation projects and (ii) land-based projects involving land acquisition, native habitat restoration, park creation, "green" stormwater and urban runoff capture, planning projects, legislation, and community engagement. The initiatives documented in this collection created over three billion dollars in new public funds for parks, natural lands, rivers, recreation, and conservation purposes in Los Angeles County and in California. These projects also established a model for over 35 billion dollars in new conservation public finance for similar legislation and ballot measures in the West, especially in Oregon and Washington states, and throughout the United States, and led to permanent park funding through Los Angeles County's Measure A: Safe, Clean Neighborhood Parks, Open Space, Beaches, Rivers Protection, and Water Conservation Measure.

Extent:

6.83 Linear Feet 8 boxes and 28.94 Gigabytes 4,741 digital files organized in 650 digital folders

Language:

English Spanish; Castilian

Preferred citation:

[Box/folder no. or item name], Esther Feldman and Community Conservation Solutions records, Collection no. 7136, Regional History Collection, Special Collections, USC Libraries, University of Southern California.

Background

Scope and content:

The Esther Feldman and Community Conservation Solutions records document the work conducted by Esther Feldman and/or Community Conservation Solutions (CCS) from the 1980s through 2020. The collection focuses on two major subject areas: (i) ballot measures and campaigns creating public financing for park and conservation projects and (ii) land-based projects involving land acquisition, native habitat restoration, park creation, 'green' stormwater and urban runoff capture, planning projects, legislation, and community engagement. The initiatives documented in this collection created over three billion dollars in new public funds for parks, natural lands, rivers, recreation, and conservation purposes in Los Angeles County and in California. These projects also established a model for over 35 billion dollars in new conservation public finance for similar legislation and ballot measures in the West, especially in Oregon and Washington states, and throughout the United States, and led to permanent park funding through Los Angeles County's Measure A: Safe, Clean Neighborhood Parks, Open Space, Beaches, Rivers Protection, and Water Conservation Measure.

The collection includes correspondence, memoranda, campaign materials, accounting, reports, press clippings, videos, born-digital files, and ephemera associated with ballot measure campaigns and other land conservation efforts. The collection also contains slides, photographic prints, and posters, including comprehensive slide files of the Baldwin Hills, Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, the Baldwin Hills Park Plan, the Zev Yaroslavsky L.A. River Greenway Trail, and the Natural Park-Air Pollution Solution at the Ramona Gardens Housing Development.

The collection documents various projects that have shaped Los Angeles County's system of protected natural lands, rivers, park and recreation lands, and trails surrounding and interlaced within metropolitan areas. The material in the collection links goals relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion with permanent county park funding that prioritizes building parks in park-poor, low-income communities of color.

Biographical / historical:

Esther Feldman has been a leader in protecting and creating new parks, natural lands, and open space in California since the 1980s, and is responsible for creating over three billion dollars in new public funds through ballot measures in L.A. County and throughout California and the U.S. for park, recreation and conservation purposes. From 1988 to the present, Feldman's work includes: numerous park and open space funding, land and water conservation efforts throughout Los Angeles County; launching the Trust for Public Land's Los Angeles Field Office; creating the Trust for Public Land's National Public Finance Program, which has since helped create over $35 billion in new conservation public funds throughout the U.S. through over 428 ballot measures in 33 states; and twenty-three years of leading Community Conservation Solutions, a non-profit 501 (c)(3) organization that she established in 1998 that pioneered urban park projects integrating both nature and people. The new public funding that Feldman created, along with the additional hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private funds that her work leveraged, has permanently changed the landscape of L.A. County, helping to fund a diverse range of urban park projects and the permanent protection and restoration of tens of thousands of acres of parks and natural open space.

In addition to every city and unincorporated area of Los Angeles County that has received funding, regional areas, rivers, and tributaries that have benefitted include (partial list only):

1. Los Angeles County Beaches
2. Santa Monica Bay
3. Santa Monica Mountains
4. Mt. Washington
5. Ascot Hills
6. Verdugo Hills
7. Santa Susana Mountains
8. San Gabriel Mountains
9. Santa Clarita Woodlands
10. Whittier-Puente Hills
11. San Jose Hills
12. Baldwin Hills
13. L.A. River
14. Rio Hondo
15. San Gabriel River
16. Santa Ana River
17. Santa Clara River
18. Compton Creek

The records in this collection are from Esther Feldman's work carried out for the following public agencies or non-profit organizations during the years indicated.

Date	Event
November 1984 - November 1988	The Planning & Conservation League, Sacramento, CA Research Director and Assistant Campaign Director
November 1988 - June 1994	Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA), Los Angeles, CA Director, Special Projects
August 1994 - March 1997	The Trust for Public Land (TPL), Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA
1997-2020	Community Conservation Solutions (formerly Community Conservancy International - name was changed in 2010)

Acquisition information:

Esther Feldman donated the analog material in the collection, along with the digital files stored on three USB flash drives, on June 23, 2022. Feldman donated the bulk of the collection's digital assets via OneDrive on December 11, 2025.

Processing information:

Digital assets in this collection were transferred to the USC Digital Library's digital asset management system to provide public access and to the USC Digital Repository for long-term preservation. The copies maintained in the Digital Repository are not publicly available. Files containing sensitive personally identifiable information, as well as duplicate files, were removed from the access copies in the USC Digital Library. However, the Digital Repository preserves a complete copy of all digital materials donated by Esther Feldman. Due to Windows file path character limits, some of Feldman's original folder names were truncated in the Digital Repository copies. In total, 28.94 gigabytes of digital files are accessible through the USC Digital Library website, and 35.6 gigabytes are preserved in the USC Digital Repository.

Arrangement:

The intellectual arrangement of series, subseries, and descriptive records in this finding aid follows Esther Feldman's original organization of the collection. Many series and subseries are further divided into three categories: (i) analog files, (ii) digitized files from USB flash drives, and (iii) digital files transferred via OneDrive. Additional information about these categories is provided in the "Existence and Location of Copies" note.

Feldman organized most of the analog and digital materials within the same subject-based series and subseries. As a result, descriptions of analog and digital materials from all three categories appear together within the finding aid's topical hierarchies. For example, Subseries A.1, California Proposition 70, California Parks and Wildlife Act (CALPAW), 1988, includes analog files, digitized files transferred via USB flash drive, and digital files transferred via OneDrive.

Some series and subseries, however, contain only analog or only digital materials. For instance, Subseries A.4 consists exclusively of analog materials, while all four of the series following Series B comprise only digital files transferred via OneDrive.

Rules or conventions:

Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Related resources

Alternative form available:

In terms of analog and digital originals and copies, the collection consists of three main categories:

1. Analog files (textual materials, photographs, posters, and other materials stored in boxes);
2. Digitized files transferred via USB flash drives in 2022;
3. Digital files transferred via OneDrive in 2025.

Most of the digital files transferred via USB flash drive have analog originals stored in the collection's boxes. However, many of the items in the analog files have never been digitized and therefore have no digital surrogates among the files transferred via USB flash drive or OneDrive.

The majority of the digital files transferred via OneDrive do not have corresponding copies in the analog files or the USB flash drives. Many of the assets transferred via OneDrive are born-digital.

Indexed terms

Subjects:

Bills, Legislative -- California -- Los Angeles -- Archival resources
Community-based conservation -- California -- Los Angeles County -- Archival resources
Conservation of natural resources -- California -- Los Angeles County -- Archival resources
Environmental policy -- California -- Archival resources
Environmental protection -- California -- Archival resources
Land Use -- Environmental aspects -- California -- Maps -- Archival resources
Land Use -- California -- Los Angeles County -- Planning -- Archival resources
Landscape protection -- California -- Los Angeles County -- Archival resources
Natural resources conservation areas -- Law and legislation -- California -- Los Angeles County -- Archival resources
Nature conservation -- California -- Los Angeles County -- Archival resources
Nonprofit organizations -- California -- Los Angeles -- Archival resources
Parks -- California -- Los Angeles -- Archival resources
Political campaigns -- California -- Archival resources
Recreation -- California -- Los Angeles -- Planning -- Archival resources
Referendum -- California -- 20th century -- Archival resources
Regional planning -- California, Southern -- Archival resources
Brochures
Files (digital files)
Correspondence
Digital images
Digital media
Ephemera
Financial records
Maps
Memorandums
Moving images
Newsletters
Newspaper clippings
Photographs
Presentation drawings (proposals)
Renderings (drawings)
Reports
Research (documents)
Site plans
Slides (photographs)
Surveys (documents)

Names:

Community Conservancy International -- Archives
Community Conservation Solutions -- Archives
Feldman, Esther -- Archives

About this collection guide

Collection Guide Author:

Bo Doub -- with descriptive notes adapted from the donor and creator of the collection, Esther Feldman.

Date Encoded:

This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2026-03-16 14:06:30 -0700 .

Restrictions:

This collection includes both analog and digital files. Advance notice is required for access to the analog material. The collection's digital files are publicly accessible via the USC Digital Library. Each folder- and file-level record describing digital material in this finding aid includes a link to the corresponding asset in the USC Digital Library's site.

Terms of access:

All requests for permission to publish or quote from items in the collection must be submitted in writing to the Department of Special Collections at specol@usc.edu. Permission for publication is given on behalf of Special Collections as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained. At the time of the collection's donation to the USC Libraries, the donor claimed all rights, title, and interest to the items in the collection, except for illustrations, artwork, and photographs that are subject to third-party copyright ownership.

Finding aid description and metadata are licensed under an Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

Preferred citation:

[Box/folder no. or item name], Esther Feldman and Community Conservation Solutions records, Collection no. 7136, Regional History Collection, Special Collections, USC Libraries, University of Southern California.

Location of this collection:

University of Southern California, Regional History Collection

Special Collections

Doheny Memorial Library, Room 209

Los Angeles, CA 90089-0182, US

Contact:

(213) 740-5900

specol@usc.edu

Website