Our Focal Areas

Supporting collaboration, tailoring systems-change work, and contributing to the stewardship movement in California and beyond.

The Network is how we connect, 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. Where we build capacities for working in partnership that make lasting on-the-ground impacts possible. 

Every three years, the Network’s Steering Committee reflects on its successes, evaluates current needs and opportunities, and charts a course forward through a strategic roadmap. They draw from targeted interviews, network-wide surveys, and in-depth discussions on key issues to choose focal areas to guide our work.  

Our strategic focal areas help demonstrate the value of stewardship at scale and continue to build and strengthen relationships to promote landscape stewardship priorities and practices. 

 

CLSN Focal Areas

 

People sitting, conversing, and thinking at tables grouped in a circle.
Collaborative approaches are at the heart of our work; photo by Studio Luniste. 

Supporting Collaborative Practice

We promote collaborative practice by connecting practitioners in ways that inform, equip, and empower them. We catalyze peer exchange and offer resources that help broaden and deepen the human connections that give networks life. We regularly organize virtual and in-person convenings to share best available practices, models, and insights into the unique challenges of working in partnerships.  

This work includes:
  • Creating opportunities for personal and professional connections and information exchange. 
  • Providing a virtual clearinghouse for better practices, partnership models, charters and agreements, and other resources. 
  • Developing culturally relevant collaborative leadership skills. 
  • Convening participants and curating spaces for meaningful and valuable conversations that lead to inspired action.  

 

Up-close photo of native plant growing through landscape netting at a restored site
We work to change the systems that limit beneficial restoration; Photo by Jim Robins.

Enabling Systems Change

We transform systems that either support or inhibit collaborative stewardship by helping shift paradigms that create barriers to this work. This means making the case for essential collaborative capacity, providing research-based resources that support the evolution of policy and practice, and developing relationships with community and state leadership to elevate landscape stewardship values and principles.  

 

 

This work includes:
  • Advancing regulatory efficiencies that increase the pace, scale, and quality of environmental restoration and stewardship across the state. 
  • Developing actionable recommendations to increase philanthropic, public, and private funding for collaborative stewardship.  
  • Working together to identify and solve specific challenges to collaborative landscape-scale stewardship at the federal, state, and local levels. 
  • Measuring the impact of landscape stewardship partnerships. 
  • Increasing awareness and appreciation of this work and effectively articulating its value to funders, policymakers, and other key stakeholders. 
  •  Expanding the lens of the stewardship workforce across sectors to advance and support equitable workforce development. 

 

Latin American woman laughing while holding a shovel
Stewardship can take many forms, like Amigos de los Rios; Photo by Studio Luniste.

Movement Building & JEDI Principles 

We support the stewardship movement through our commitment to leading with the principles of justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging. We engage with our community of practice with a spirit of allyship as well as with resources to help promote JEDI values and foster a culture of joy in this work. 

 

 

This work includes:
  • Creating tools, approaches, and meaningful conversation that help landscape stewardship be more inclusive, equitable, and culturally relevant. 
  • Supporting leadership of communities of color and others who have faced disinvestment or have been denied access to nature, open space, or ancestral lands. 
  • Healing severed connections among communities and with nature. 
  • Sharing stories of stewardship in its many forms to increase momentum for collaborative landscape stewardship work. 
  • Listening to BIPOC leaders, amplifying their voices, and working to share resources and power with under-resourced communities working in stewardship.

 

Read the full 2024-2026 strategic roadmap