and public support, while expanding and deepening
the meaning and impact of our stewardship work.
Our first reflection is that community outreach and
engagement practices are most effective when inte-
grated in project conceptualization and planning and
are carried through the duration. We recommend that
urban foresters engage community residents as peer
experts from the beginning, asking where, what, and
how to plant, rather than simply planting and later
asking residents to care for the trees. When hosting
community meetings, consider all dimensions of acces-
sibility, including multilingual outreach and translation,
sign language and captioning, childcare and food at
meetings, having meetings at different times of day
and days of week, and paying people stipends for their
time in consultation and dialogue. (Planners can build
these stipends into their project budgets and grant
applications.) Most importantly, look to hire locally
when staffing up for community liaisons, workers,
research assistants, and interns. There is no better
way to tap into and amplify local ecological knowledge
than to hire locally and invest in your community. >>
Examples of Biocultural
Trainings and Cross-
Cultural Dialogues
These examples are drawn from the USDA
Forest Service publication, Biocultural
stewardship, Indigenous and local ecolog-
ical knowledge, and the urban crucible.
Hālau ʻŌhiʻa: The creation of
Kekuhi Kealikanakaole, Hālau ʻŌhiʻa
is an intensive professional and per-
sonal development training program in
Hawaiʻi life-ways designed for natural
resource and conservation practitioners.
Learning from Place: The authors
organized Learning from Place, a two-day
exchange in New York City led by Kekuhi
and framed with Hālau ʻŌhiʻa approaches,
exercises, and concepts. The exchange
enabled natural resource practitioners
from Hawai'i and NYC to learn together,
to be inspired, and to create new ideas
to take back into their workplaces.
Stewardship Salons: Over the
course of Learning from Place, the authors
observed a desire to keep alive this con-
versation and creative exchange in a
community of practice subsequently named
Stewardship Salons. Held in NYC with col-
leagues from research, natural resource
management, and the arts, with a rotating
set of teacher-facilitators, the goal was to
support the "stewards of stewardship" in
learning from place and from each other.
< Practitioners from Hawaii and NYC
participated in the Learning from
Place workshop, engaging many
ways of knowing urban nature. All
photos courtesy of Giles Ashford.
urban-forestry.com 25
