COLLABORATIVE STEWARDSHIP TOOLKIT 

A Practitioners’ Guide, Designed to Support Land- & Seascape Collaboratives

Although stewardship collaboratives aren’t new, their scale and complexity, as well as the expectations of what they can do continue to grow. In some regions, collaborative stewardship approaches have become the primary way of working.  “Why should we collaborate?” is no longer the dominant question. Instead, many wonder, “How do we establish and design an effective collaborative?” and “What is needed to build, sustain, or renew or retire a collaborative?”  

Answering these questions is the focus of this toolkit.  

Effective collaboration requires those involved to step outside familiar roles, embrace risk and uncertainty, shift mindsets, and adjust how they operate. Along with the shift to working this way comes the need for new skills and capacities to help these groups form, effectively operate, equitably engage, and adapt over time. 

Users are invited to explore the advice and resources within based on where they are in their collaborative process, and to adapt what is here to meet their individual needs. The toolkit’s authors have made this living document open source and available to anyone as a statement a commitment to equity and inclusion and as a way to help continue to build a stewardship movement.  We are currently working on an interactive web-based version of this document, check back here for the latest this fall!