Urban foresters today are faced with an unprecedented challenge in the context
of climate change and social crises: achieving sustainability and resilience
goals while supporting diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. Experience sug-
gests that partnerships are needed with community members who can provide
local knowledge, legitimacy, and action beyond one plan, one agency, or one
grant program, to influence the structure and function of the urban forest.
For nearly twenty years, our research teams have worked with urban and com-
munity forestry partners to make local acts of stewardship visible to foresters,
planners, and decision-makers. To do this, we engaged at the grassroots level
to assess the impact of stewardship on organizations and natural resources.
Thus, the Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP) began
as a research methodology and community organizing approach, answering
the fundamental question: who takes care of the local environment?
The STEW-MAP survey was designed to be paired with local ecological knowledge,
often gleaned from interviews and participant observation. Through STEW-MAP, we
have learned who is participating in stewardship, how and where they are partici-
pating, and what their impact is. By assessing and mapping stewardship, we have
generated otherwise-unavailable robust information about groups and environmental
governance, and where the inequities in the landscape are. We have also learned
about social networks and have seen how resources (e.g. labor, financial capital,
and knowledge) flow to and from groups and how this shapes their sustainability.
Here we present some lessons from STEW-MAP that we believe to be common
across all the sites where it has been applied. The knowledge we gained has been
co-produced with and continues to grow from a larger community of practice
that includes partners from across the world, including Baltimore, Los Angeles,
San Juan, Medellín, Hawai'i, Canada, the Philippines, France, and Mexico. >>
U.S. Forest Service and Partners
Why stewardship
Reflections from two decades
of learning from community-
based environmental groups
By Erika Svendsen, Lindsay Campbell, Michelle Johnson, and Natalia Piland
Photos Courtesy U.S. Forest Service
20 CityTREES
