legacy giving

Leaving a Lasting Legacy

We're extremely grateful to receive a $5 Million gift from Sid and Diane Gibbins.  It's an amazing honor to witness HOW our members ensure that Washington remains evergreen for generations to come.

Read this touching letter below from their daughter Karen and her tribute to her parents leaving a lasting legacy for nature in our beautiful state.


As we move into the next stage of distributions from my mother’s estate, I’m thinking more of my parents and their vision for preserving some of Washington’s last best places - the ones to which they gravitated as a young couple in Washington in the early 1950s just starting out in their own adult lives and the ones they cherished in their final years.

They saw the beauty and the benefits of those open spaces. And they felt strongly enough to look to The Nature Conservancy to partner in giving others, both the young and the old, a chance to continue to experience in perpetuity what they did during their short stay on this planet. Many weekends, they would pack a rudimentary lunch of peanut butter sandwiches, and pack their young family into their camper to travel deep into the forest from city streets along unpaved roads to get closer to nature. There, they shared their love of nature with their family, on hikes to areas of natural beauty that still resonate with me today.

Sid Gibbins, a native New Yorker who grew up in Los Angeles, would bring his 35 mm camera to add to his voluminous collection of slides detailing a world of flora and fauna that he would keenly see all around him in spectacular Northwest settings. Diane, daughter of a career military officer, grew up in locations as diverse as Hawaii and Georgia, earned a master’s degree at the University of Washington, where she met Sid, who was earning his doctorate in chemistry. Diane was a strong supporter of protecting animals in the wild and the environment. Sid would die in Bellingham in 2005 at age 78. Diane would follow in 2015 at 86.

I’ve followed the work of the Nature Conservancy in Washington State and - as my mother and father were - am impressed with its goals, philosophy and commitment to preservation of land that Sid and Diane Gibbins — my beloved parents — felt so strongly about retaining for future generations. As we move forward, it’s important to keep their vision in mind. And the Conservancy concept of providing documentation to Gibbins family members, myself and Laura Gibbins, would be acceptable to us at this time to provide us with a list of places that have been preserved by the posthumous donation of Sid and Diane that we can show to future generations of their descendants.