The Stewardship Mapping Project (STEW-MAP): New York City

Status

Ongoing

Who takes care of New York City’s environment? The answer is all of us. Our landscapes are shaped by many different institutions, groups and individuals. STEW-MAP is a data-driven community and partnership organizing tool designed to demonstrate that people can be positive agents of change in their communities. Our intent is to visualize the often ‘unseen network’ of stewardship actions throughout any given neighborhood, city, region or beyond.

Overview
Projects
People
Resources

STEW-MAP supports government and civic groups alike to effectively coordinate and collaborate, to identify opportunities to better engage New Yorkers in caring for the environment, and to enhance the capacity of the stewards of our communities. This tool can support civic participation, increase neighborhoods’ social cohesion, and support requests for funding and programming.

The first ever STEW-MAP survey was completed in NYC in 2007. Since the publication of the data, STEW-MAP has been used in NYC to support civic participation, increase neighborhoods’ social cohesion, and support requests for funding and programming. In 2015, STEW-MAP was replicated for waterfront-focused stewardship groups in the New York Harbor area, in collaboration with the Hudson River Foundation/Harbor Estuary Project (HRF/HEP).

In 2017, STEW-MAP was replicated in the New York City Region. This study was expanded to include the entire greater metropolitan area and added “transform” as a function. In this study, 55 partners served as data providers and 847 respondents were included in the research results. The data collected in the 2017 survey can be explored visually and spatially on the online map and dashboard.

What We Learned in New York City

STEW-MAP includes 720 groups with a combined budget of $5,301,875,991 and a total of approximately 633,000 people engaged as staff, volunteers, and members. Explore some of our findings below:

Stewards persists over time:

Stewardship groups not only exist - they persist. They have evolved along with the social, political, economic, and environmental histories of our city.

Stewardship comes in all shapes and sizes:

In NYC, stewardship territory ranges in scale from a single tree to a watershed, to an entire region. It varies in shape and can include rectangular lots, linear strips, curving shorelines, and blocky political districts. For some stewards, such as community gardeners, territory is the specific site where physical land management occurs. Other groups focus on advocacy across wider spatial scales -- such as environmental justice groups running neighborhood air quality or green job campaigns.

More than just green....and not just urban:

Stewardship groups don’t just focus on the environment. They hail from many different sectors, including public health, social services, transportation, education, and housing. Yet, these groups all share the belief that the environment can be a catalyst for social change. groups focus on transformation of waste, food, or energy systems, and therefore have multiple sites across the city. In addition, we found that many groups work beyond the boundaries of New York City and into the greater metropolitan region.

word cloud with "community" in the middle

Stewards respond to disturbance:

Stewardship is one of the ways that NYC communities respond to disturbances and stressors such as climate change, extreme weather, disinvestment and gentrification. This pattern has repeated over time here in New York City, with stewardship groups forming in response to the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, September 11th, Hurricane Sandy, and most recently, the COVID-19 crisis.

Stewards are agents of change:

Stewardship groups work on everything from restoring New York City’s oyster population, to protecting natural areas from development, to helping women get outside to exercise and form empowering friendships and civic ties. Taken together, these efforts can collectively transform our environment and communities.

2017 New York Project: Building Upon Past Research

STEW-MAP 2017 builds upon past research, providing the first update in 10 years on previously participating groups. In addition to capturing change over time, the 2017 survey data revealed the ways in which the larger stewardship landscape has evolved in the New York Region, including how the changing climate, political administration shifts, social movements, and environmental disasters have influenced the goals and methods of stewardship groups. We partnered with more than 55 data providers and sent the updated STEW-MAP survey to more than 10,000 civic groups and organizations. We also expanded our approach to include the wider New York City Region, beyond the 5 boroughs, by surveying all registered environmental nonprofits in the greater metropolitan region.

We identified approximately 900 groups in total. These groups demonstrate what we call “the greening of the civic” -- or the way in which environmental concerns are embedded within organizational missions that have diverse foci, such as community development, social services, youth, arts, and public health. In addition to their role in hands-on stewardship, we found that many stewardship groups collect data and track social and environmental metrics in order to understand and monitor their impact. They use a range of communication strategies that go well beyond the formal, public community meeting - including both face-to-face organizing as well as digital strategies such as websites, listservs, and social media strategies. Stewardship groups participate in knowledge networks, resource networks, and collaborative governance of our local environment.

One of the major findings of the 2017 study is that stewardship groups persist and change over time. Other important findings include:

Stewards act as agents of change that transform NYC’s urban ecosystem in many ways.
Stewards are not just involved in greening; environmental stewards efforts are embedded in efforts that improve community quality of life.
Grassroots efforts abide in NYC and stewardship persists at the local level among all volunteer groups. Yet, some stewards are professionalized and have paid staff, substantial budgets, and 501c3 status
Stewardship groups are knowledge producers: groups collect data, track metrics, and monitor the local environment
Stewardship comes in different shapes and sizes: groups are working everywhere in the city, at different scales
Groups do not work alone: stewardship happens in networks
Stewardship groups are not just working on urban territories, their work spans across the greater metropolitan region.

The findings of this study along with highlights of the stories and impacts of New York City’s diverse network of Stewards were presented in an exhibition at the Queens Museum in the Fall of 2019. This exhibit, entitled Who Takes Care of New York is now available to view and interact with online: https://www.thenatureofcities.com/friec/wtcony-2020/

Explore the data for yourself! Visit the online map and data dashboard - try starting with the map’s help guide which will orient you to the map and different ways to sort and view the data. You can also download the data using the web map.

Read the General Technical Report.

2015 New York and New Jersey Project - Waterfront Stewards

Read our Forest Service report - Connecting with our waterways: an assessment of public access and stewardship in the New York - New Jersey Harbor Estuary

STEW-MAP was replicated for waterfront-focused stewardship groups in the New York Harbor area, in collaboration with the Hudson River Foundation/Harbor and Estuary Program (HRF/HEP). We found 146 civic organizations that provide a broad array of programs that help engage people with the Harbor Estuary, primarily through community organizing, public outreach, and volunteering or employment. Particularly relevant to waterfront activities, 22% of these organizations offer boating, swimming, or fishing programs. About one third conduct climate change education programs or projects critical to building social resiliency. But as with physical access, the location and the capacity of this network is not evenly distributed. This stewardship assessment identified waterfront areas with higher and lower concentrations of stewardship activity, which was then analyzed alongside data on access and community needs. This work has enabled HRF/HEP to prioritizing grant funding towards increasing public waterfront access and stewardship. To learn more, read the report.

Additional research by NYC Urban Station Fellow Johan Enqvist built upon this dataset to examine engagement by waterfront stewards in relation to sense of place through conducting in-depth interviews with 31 waterfront stewards. He found that place meanings are useful to differentiate between groups based on how they currently view the site (as a place of work, a place of home, or a place of use), and what they want to achieve for it in their stewardship efforts. some groups work to restore what the place was previously, others work to protect what it currently is, while a few work to create an entirely new identity for their place. These findings demonstrate how there can be multiple different pathways to stewardship, which cannot be understood by simply assessing the strength of place attachment alone.

a collage of images of people doing work in a park in NYC

In 2007, research scientists Erika Svendsen and Lindsay K. Campbell from the NYC Urban Field Station joined up with sociologist Dana R. Fisher to create a method of assessing and mapping civic stewardship throughout New York City. These researchers took advantage of emerging technologies in spatial and network mapping as well as established sociological methods in tracking organizational behaviors. By the end of 2007, the activities and locations of hundreds of stewardship groups were mapped and accounted for, representing a broad spectrum of care for a dense urban environment. This map, referred to as STEW-MAP, was used to better understand the impact and capacity of environmental action. It has inspired many others to collect their own STEW-MAP data noting that it is truly data from the grassroots that demonstrates the depth and breadth of how people join together to care for their everyday landscape.

The 2007 STEW-MAP survey resulted in a public map of 500 groups that take care of all five boroughs. These resources continue to be live on NYC OASIS in map and searchable database form.

The research found that there are hundreds of groups citywide that range from informal, groups of friends and neighbors to professionalized organizations with large budgets and staff. These diverse groups care for different components of the urban ecosystem, including vegetation - such as parks, community gardens, street trees, the built environment -- including green buildings, and waterways and waterfronts. Across this network, we identified key organizations that serve as brokers, connecting resources and information across sectors and scales. To read the original research, see the resources tab.

The 2007 STEW-MAP data are regularly used by umbrella civic organizations and government agencies to identify groups for collaboration and to understand the broader civic stewardship landscape. To read more about how these data were used, read our impact stories here.