We envision thriving communities participating as stewards of resilient ecosystems, creating solutions that model best practices to reach optimum watershed health for future generations.
We believe each site is unique. We strive to understand the layered ecological and cultural histories embedded in a place. Our designs reveal and restore the natural processes of a site to enhance the health of the soil, plants, animals, humans, and the watershed. We believe every landscape can beautifully demonstrate ways that human needs and ecological resilience are intertwined, with lasting significance for generations to come.
We believe in collaboration and co-creating, with others and with our environments. Our clients are project partners; we work together to map out long-term futures for unique places. Through conversations, design charrettes and needs assessments, we help define the guiding vision for each site. The natural systems at work on a site inform our designs. We strive to strengthen connections between ecological systems and the built environmental to create dynamic, nature-based strategies that build resilience to the impacts of climate change.
We believe communities are integral to the design process. We facilitate processes for public engagement and stakeholder input, and create open and accessible design tools for communities to enable dialogue and civic participation. We work with communities to design and shape landscapes from the site scale to the regional scale – working with landscape as the connector of neighborhoods, cities, and watersheds. As part of this work, we facilitate processes for those doing the work. We are always learning from the communities we work with while creating and providing trainings for designers, installers, policy makers and grassroots organizations actively working in communities.
We value learning from others. Those in the community already doing the work have the most knowledge of that place. We seek to learn from community leaders that understand needs, manual labor workers building our landscapes, and maintenance teams who are caring for sites; from tribal members with deep ancestral knowledge of the land and school teachers working with youth to transform their schools, you guide our work.
We believe in getting our hands dirty. We understand that site analysis, design, engineering and outreach pave the way for what really matters: on-the-ground implementation. Our design-build practice streamlines the path to construction. Our installation team is ready to work with clients and partners to realize your vision.
We believe resilience equals diversity and adaptability. We strive to be constantly learning and growing, as a team, in our work, and with our partners and communities. We believe long-term resilience requires taking risks, learning from mistakes and being willing to change. This is why we not only consult, plan and design we also implement, monitor and test, this feedback loop is critical to our process.