Collaborative Stewardship
Headquartered in Ann Arbor, MI, The Stewardship Network is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with an award-winning, 20-year history of connecting, equipping, and mobilizing people and organizations to care for land and water in their communities. Through shared experiences, knowledge, and resources, we continue to build an ever larger and more impactful network of place-based collectives (TSN Member Communities) to care for our natural environment.
Think of TSN as the broad trunk of a tree, sustaining an expanding canopy of flowering branches. While we’re removing administrative hurdles and supporting Member Communities with vital, right-sized, centralized services, they’re out in the field pouring thousands and thousands of annual work hours into our ecosystems. The “branches” then return their hard-won lessons and best practices to us so we can disseminate them to all. It’s a model suited to the scale of modern challenges and we’re just getting started.
MOBILIZE (Collaborative Stewardship Services Program)
Through our Member Communities Program, The Stewardship Network makes collaborative ecological stewardship accessible to every community – empowering stewards from all walks of life and experience levels to collectively care for our environment. To that end, we spark and sustain a diverse network of individuals and organizations to align impact and re-imagine solutions to the pressing social-ecological issues of our time. The work we do with and through our TSN Member Communities is the heart of our organization and is absolutely vital to our shared ecological future:
- Land stewardship & ecological health projects
- Invasive species management & early detection and response (EDRR)
- Habitat management, biological diversity, and landscape connectivity
- Water quality and watershed restoration
- Regenerative and local agricultural food ecosystems
- Social-ecological network assessment and visualization
- Strategic planning, organizational development, and business planning
EQUIP (Member Communities Program)
The Stewardship Network provides an efficient backbone support and technology system – coordinated leadership support, operational framework, communications/engagement platform, and financial/administrative services – to TSN Member Communities across the nation. The Network approach builds inclusivity and diversity into land stewardship efforts (while increasing visibility and reach of local land-based community organizations) and we fully embrace the unique supporting role we play in eliciting large-scale change through aligned effort. These services include:
- Stewardship training and education
- Coordinator support and leadership development
- Event registration/communications (TSN Events Calendar)
- Backbone technology support and communication services
- Administrative, HR, and fiduciary services
- Integrated technology, systems, and TSN support staff services
CONNECT (Learning & Engagement Program)
The Stewardship Network has become an enormous nexus of relevant, specialized knowledge through decades of successful collaboration. While that hard-earned wisdom is leveraged all year long in service of our TSN Member Communities, we chose long ago to dedicate a meaningful portion of our energies to sharing these learnings with the widest audience possible. Today, those activities include:
- The Stewardship Network Conference
- The Stewardship Network Spring Challenge
- The Stewardship Network Monthly Webcasts
- The Stewardship Network Nature Photography Competition
- The Stewardship Network Member Communities’ Events
- The Stewardship Network Distributed Leadership Program
- The Stewards’ Circle program (Huron Arbor Cluster)
- Classroom speaking and student mentorship
- Community engagement events
If you have a conservation project in mind, have a service need, or want to engage our team, please Contact Us


