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Who We Are

Connect people, discover common purpose, and face shared challenges and opportunities together. Straightforward ideas such as these can sometimes give rise to remarkable things.

In 2016, these ideas inspired six landscape-scale collaboratives from sunny Irvine to the misty North Coast’s redwoods to form the California Landscape Stewardship Network. Since then, the Network has grown to represent a diverse range of partnerships from across the state that have come together to overcome the challenges we face when working across boundaries, and to inspire others to join us.

What We Do

We consider "landscapes" beyond the soil beneath our feet. Our largest and most pressing challenges—climate change, the need for clean air and water, social and environmental justice concerns, and the ongoing impacts of an historic pandemic—blur the lines between ecology and culture and between the past and the present. 

With this common understanding as our foundation, we bring together those doing landscape stewardship to help create a California where everyone can see their role in caring for and sustaining the places that are vital to our collective well-being. 

A California where we seek deep understanding and bold collaboration as we think, plan, and act beyond our individual boundaries.

A California where we can work at a pace and scale that meets and even exceeds our most pressing challenges.

And a California where the values of empathy, humility, and inclusivity drive how we make decisions around our cherished places for current and future generations.

How We Do It

The Network is a place where we can share resources and solve common problems. Where we help build awareness of the value of working at a landscape scale. Where we can find ways to increase support for this work from funders and lawmakers. To date, we have focused on several key ways to advance this shared vision:

We catalyze peer exchange by connecting practitioners and broadening and deepening the collaborative connections that give networks life.

We build capacity for landscape stewardship and support cross-boundary collaborative work by sharing the knowledge and skills that empower partnerships to succeed.

We solve shared problems by working to address the barriers to collaborative work at scale, identifying ways to be more inclusive and effective, and developing relationships with community and state leadership that elevate landscape stewardship values and principles.

Common to all of these is our support for the broader movement to shift the conservation paradigm toward a focus on landscape-scale stewardship, and our commitment to engage beyond the scope of traditional conservation for a more equitable and holistic approach to this work.