Stewardship practitioners and others who wish to engage the public through outreach and engagement in communities across the Chesapeake Bay watershed will benefit from a systematic analysis of barriers for stewardship engagement in local communities. This project seeks to bring a better understanding of those barriers, and then to find community-led, practical solutions to overcoming the barriers in specific communities, and to disseminate that knowledge widely for the benefit of the practitioners who are seeking to more fully engage those communities.

This project will co-develop knowledge and solutions with members of local communities to:

• Improve our understanding of the relationship between attitudes and behaviors towards environmental stewardship and socio-economic factors.
• Develop a clearer understanding of potential barriers to participation in environmental stewardship activities as perceived by the people living in local communities.
• Evaluate community members' perspectives about different approaches for removing barriers to participation.
• Implement a community-based stewardship project based on findings.

Project photo by Chesapeake Bay Foundation.