The grant was announced by Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage at Glenfalloch yesterday as part of a $4.2million package for community conservation and recreation groups across the country.
The trust has 70 volunteers and more than 100 participating landowners and has killed 13,500 pests on the peninsula in the past six years.
Group project manager Ursula Ellenberg said some of the money would be used to employ a volunteer co-ordinator over the next few years.
"I think it will be the saviour of the trust. We’ve got so many volunteers, but right now everyone is a bit all over the place."
The new employee could put those volunteers "into the right places and keep them safe", she said.
"Over the last few years, we’ve put so much effort into battling down possums on the peninsula, but we’re now starting to get worried about reinvasion."
The grant would also be used for operational costs, such as buying more traps, she said.
The tragedy of groups such as theirs was that they received short-term funding, without much job security, she said.
Trustee Rod Morris said the funding was important as it was difficult to get funding for its staff positions.
"We’re in it for the long haul."
He also recognised the efforts of the many other conservation groups in Dunedin.
Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage said she was "very jealous of Otago" for its conservation efforts and "very congratulatory" of the work of the trust.
It was a "huge effort" to involve the vast majority of major landowners on the peninsula in the project, she said.
"It’s landscape-scale predator control and what the key successes here have been are the partnerships of landowners and volunteers wanting to do the pest control."
The $4.2million overall grant was "a start" in increasing conservation efforts in the country, she said.
"There has been significant underfunding of conservation over the last nine years, so the challenge is to actually grow the resourcing for the department and better enable it to work with community organisations and landholders and iwi."
In the Green Party’s confidence and supply agreement with Labour it was agreed to significantly increase conservation funding, she said.
