About Us
Our Mission
Our mission is to protect local nature and farmland to ensure a healthy environment for everyone. We do this through advocacy, education, and grassroots action focused on San Mateo, Santa Clara, and San Benito Counties.
Our Vision
Green Foothills envisions a resilient region where wildlife thrives, everyone has natural beauty to enjoy, and communities live in balance with nature. Learn more about our vision.
Why Green Foothills?
Our planet faces both a climate crisis and a biodiversity crisis. Every day, decisions are made at all levels of government that can either help to solve these crises or worsen them.
Green Foothills’ work targets decisions made at the local level. Cities, counties, and other local agencies can either benefit or harm the environment with their actions. It is Green Foothills’ mission to ensure that those actions promote climate resilience, protect wildlife habitat and natural landscapes, preserve farmland and support local farms, and encourage access to nature, especially for disadvantaged communities.
Our Programs
Our Impact
We have a proven track record of making a real difference for local nature, wildlife, and people. We’re proud to share what we’ve accomplished.
How You Can Help
We’d love to have you as part of our supporter community and work toward our vision of a better world for all. Explore the various ways to get involved.
Our History
In the late 1950s, our region was on the brink of a massive transformation with plans to turn the Bay Area into a mega-metropolis. The plans sought to fill in much of the Bay with development, run freeways over mountain ranges, and develop the San Mateo coast.
While many people accepted these plans as inevitable, on the peninsula, activists from the South Bay came together to keep “factories out of the foothills.” They lost this original effort, and the Stanford Industrial Park was built, raising concerns that all of the foothills would disappear if a more concerted effort was not made to save them. In May 1962, twenty-seven of those activists came together to form Committee for Green Foothills (renamed Green Foothills in 2020), recognizing the urgent need to preserve local nature as development surged.
Soon after its founding, the organization expanded its mission to protect nature and farmland in all of San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties. In the 2020s, as pressure for sprawl development pushed southward, the organization expanded into San Benito County as well.