Interactive toolkit coming soon!

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.  

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. 

None of this is easy, and it may feel like it’s being added on top of already full workloads. However, collaborative stewardship and conservation approaches are becoming increasingly critical. “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.  

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.