In November of 2023, Oregon Shores' board of directors voted to adopt our first-ever strategic plan. After gathering input from staff, volunteers, community partners, and other stakeholders, this plan outlines how Oregon Shores can best serve coastal communities and conservation in the next three years. This plan will be reviewed and updated annually.
2025-2027 Organizational Goals
Education: More people will become inspired by, understand, and value the importance of protecting Oregon’s coastal ecosystems’ natural and cultural resources.
Action: More people will be empowered to take meaningful actions to protect Oregon’s coast.
Public Policy: Public policy decisions by city, county, state, and federal government decision-makers will increasingly protect Oregon’s coast.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility: A greater geographic, racial, ethnic, cultural, age, gender, and economic diversity of people are engaged in our programming, reflected on our staff and in our partnerships, and feel that the Oregon coastline and or programming are accessible and inclusive.

People:Oregon Shores will develop the volunteer, board, and staff capacity to robustly implement this Strategic Plan.
Sustainable Finances: Oregon Shores will grow its revenue and manage its investments and expenses so that it can successfully implement this Plan and be able to respond to urgent, unmet needs.
Partnerships: Oregon Shores will develop stronger, more collaborative working relationships with partner organizations.
Brand: More people and potential partner organizations will know about and have positive opinions of Oregon Shores.

Implementing our Theory of Change

Our Impact
The ultimate outcome sought by Oregon Shores is a protected coast. To accomplish that, Oregon Shores engages people to Learn, which inspires them to Take Action.
How we get there
This includes actions people take on their own (private stewardship), together (shared stewardship), or as advocates influencing public policies. Actions can also help build organizational capacity, allowing for even more future learning opportunities, action opportunities, and public policy advocacy.
Conservation Issue Priorities
At any given time, Oregon Shores will identify and maintain a list of 3-5 Conservation Issue Priorities around which to focus its work in pursuit of its education goal, its action goal, and its public policy goal. These priorities include Top Priorities for which proactive work should be planned and Watch Priorities where work should be proactively planned only if additional staff capacity allows it. These “watch priorities” are areas in which we do not have the staff or resource capacity to engage regularly, but we reserve the right to engage if these issues will directly affect any of our conservation issue priorities. Since all ecosystems and ecosystem functions are connected, what happens in one area (i.e., mining on an upper river) could directly affect something in another (i.e. estuaries).
While Oregon Shores will focus most of its work on these conservation issue priorities, it will sometimes work reactively or opportunistically on issues beyond the priorities when warranted.
As of December 2024, Top Priority for 2025 is:
- Coastal Resilience: using adaptive management, land use planning system, and conservation policy as tools to achieve protections for the following ecosystem priorities
- Estuaries
- Ocean
- Coastal Lands
We define “Coastal Resilience” as the capacity of the socioeconomic and natural systems in the coastal environment to cope with disturbances induced by factors such as climate change, sea level rise, extreme events, and human impacts by adapting while maintaining their essential functions.
Watch Priorities for 2025 are:
- Upper rivers, forests and mining, and water quality