Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP)

Grants to USA and Territories state, local, and tribal agencies, IHEs, farming cooperatives, and agricultural producers for environmental projects. Applicants are advised that required registrations may take several weeks to complete. Funding is intended for a range of on-the-ground conservation activities implemented by farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners.

The Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) promotes coordination of NRCS conservation activities with partners that offer value-added contributions to expand the collective ability to address on-farm, watershed, and regional natural resource concerns. Through RCPP, NRCS seeks to co-invest with partners to implement projects that demonstrate innovative solutions to conservation challenges and provide measurable improvements and outcomes tied to the resource concerns they seek to address.

RCPP Conservation Activities:

RCPP projects may include a range of on-the-ground conservation activities implemented by farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners. These activities include:

• Land management/land improvement/restoration practices
  
• Land rentals
• Entity-held easements
• United States-held easements
• Public works/watersheds

A single RCPP project application can propose to employ any combination of these eligible activity types as part of an RCPP project.

Successful RCPP projects embody the following core principles:

• Impact: RCPP applications must propose effective and compelling solutions that address one or more natural resource priorities to help solve natural resource challenges. Partners are responsible for evaluating a project’s impact and results.
  
• Partner Contributions: Partners are responsible for identifying any combination of cash and in-kind value-added contributions to leverage NRCS’s RCPP investments. It is NRCS’s goal that partner contributions at least equal the NRCS investment in an RCPP project. Substantive partner contributions are given priority consideration as part of the RCPP application evaluation criteria. 
• Innovation: NRCS seeks projects that integrate multiple conservation approaches, implement innovative conservation approaches or technologies, build new partnerships, and effectively take advantage of program flexibilities to deliver conservation solutions.
• Partnerships and Management: Partners must have experience, expertise, and capacity to manage the partnership and project, provide outreach to producers, and quantify the environmental outcomes of an RCPP project. RCPP ranking criteria give preference to applicants that meaningfully engage historically underserved farmers and ranchers.

RCPP applicants must identify in their proposals whether they are applying to the CCA or State/multistate fund pool. For more information, see page 7 of the NOFO in Attached Files, below.