The Stewardship Network Fund
For more than 20 years, we’ve been building on victories and learning from setbacks, growing and sharpening as we go. Season after season, we’ve made our diverse TSN Member Communities increasingly effective, better informed, and more profoundly connected, helping them to have “large and centralized” impact with “small and localized” precision. Experience has hammered our unique organizational model into a potent and efficient engine of change that continues to grow in size and efficacy.
Today, our roots run strong and pervasive across The Great Lakes and our reach is ever widening, with Member Communities now as far away as California, Oregon, and Maryland. Together, with continued fiscal support, we can positively redefine the practice of stewardship and protect the ecosystems we call home in perpetuity.
SWxSW CISMA
But what happens to perennial programs when that support is interrupted?
What opportunities are squandered when startup resources cannot be secured?
Consistency is crucial
From the very earliest days, TSN has been a strong partner to our Member Communities in navigating a complex funding landscape and it’s not getting any easier. In the best of times, stewardship is often overlooked and underappreciated even within the conservation world, and this is not the best of times.
Meanwhile, seasoned stewards know that the key to this work is patient, unfaltering diligence. Ecosystem protection and rehabilitation requires that we keep showing up, no matter what other worthy priorities dominate the zeitgeist. After decades of working entirely within the current system, we’ve come to the conclusion that we cannot STAND TOGETHER FOR NATURE without trying to make this better, so we’re doing something about it.
Introducing TSNF
With the support of leaders and visionaries in our field, we’ve set out to challenge long-held assumptions. Instead of warping stewardship work to address funding opportunities, we’re out to build a funding vehicle that suits the specific needs of nature’s caretakers. When it blooms, The Stewardship Network Fund (TSNF) will provide consistent, year-over-year resources that aren’t threatened by shifting politics, cultural trends, or short attention spans. TSNF will mean more of this vital work happening steadily and consistently across our wide area of coverage for much greater impact and a much stronger return on investment. It will mean retaining and attracting stewardship leaders to our TSN Member Communities and it will mean keeping those professionals out in the field instead of bound to their offices, as the trust that grows organically from long term relationships supplants endless applications and onerous reporting. This will be a funding source built explicitly for stewardship and the urgent but patient timelines that stewardship demands.
And yet, as significant and potentially transformative as this idea is, we see it as a natural amplification of what The Stewardship Network has been doing quietly for more than 20 years. The planet needs us to dramatically increase the flow of helpful human actions and between the ongoing operations of TSN and the dawn of TSNF, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
Learn More
Through 20+ years of relationship building, The Stewardship Network sits actively at the center of a growing web of nature’s caretakers. We know who to trust and we know what they need to fulfill their vital missions. Caring for nature’s caretakers is what we’re here to do and this is the next step.
TSNF’s first, near-term goal is to raise $5 million by 2027. While some of this will be used to build TSN’s internal capacity to prepare for what comes next, the bulk will be distributed to the Member Communities themselves for boots-on-the-ground stewardship work.
Based on years of discussion, vetting, and analysis with experts in this space, our long-term goal is to sustain this fund with a total raise of $150 million.
Go with us on this for a moment. Imagine that you own a large factory whose operations shed an endless stream of valuable work gloves and you want to put them into/onto the hands of environmental stewards instead of throwing them away. Great idea, but how will you go about it? You could, of course, engage with hundreds of conservation groups you’ve never met and fulfill unending requests alongside your daily operations. If instead, though, you gave those gloves to The Stewardship Network (a wise move since they know many worthy groups already and can quickly vet new ones), you’d have just created our widely-celebrated TSN Gloves for Good program, which as of Spring 2025 has delivered over 47,000 pairs across the country and saved recipient organizations more than $100,000. Your assets, your desire to help, and our execution to make sure the donation has maximally positive impact without requiring you to pack a single box.
Now, imagine you’re someone with a desire to leverage your personal or institutional wealth to preserve our planet. Once active, TSNF will do the same thing for donors that Gloves for Good has accomplished for its suppliers. With your generosity and our unique position in the sector, the impact we’ll have together will be genuinely transformational.
Are you with us?
Please contact:
Lisa Brush, CEO & Founder
The Stewardship Network
lbrush@stewardshipnetwork.org
734-395-4483
Introducing TSNF
With the support of leaders and visionaries in our field, we’ve set out to challenge long-held assumptions. Instead of warping stewardship work to address funding opportunities, we’re out to build a funding vehicle that suits the specific needs of nature’s caretakers. When it blooms, The Stewardship Network Fund (TSNF) will provide consistent, year-over-year resources that aren’t threatened by shifting politics, cultural trends, or short attention spans. TSNF will mean more of this vital work happening steadily and consistently across our wide area of coverage for much greater impact and a much stronger return on investment. It will mean retaining and attracting stewardship leaders to our TSN Member Communities and it will mean keeping those professionals out in the field instead of bound to their offices, as the trust that grows organically from long term relationships supplants endless applications and onerous reporting. This will be a funding source built explicitly for stewardship and the urgent but patient timelines that stewardship demands.
And yet, as significant and potentially transformative as this idea is, we see it as a natural amplification of what The Stewardship Network has been doing quietly for more than 20 years. The planet needs us to dramatically increase the flow of helpful human actions and between the ongoing operations of TSN and the dawn of TSNF, that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Are you with us?
Consistency is crucial
For more than 20 years, we’ve been building on victories and learning from setbacks, growing and sharpening as we go. Season after season, we’ve made our diverse TSN Member Communities increasingly effective, better informed, and more profoundly connected, helping them to have “large and centralized” impact with “small and localized” precision. Experience has hammered our unique organizational model into a potent and efficient engine of change that continues to grow in size and efficacy. Today, our roots run strong and pervasive across The Great Lakes and our reach is ever widening, with Member Communities now as far away as California, Oregon, and Maryland. Together, with continued fiscal support, we can positively redefine the practice of stewardship and protect the ecosystems we call home in perpetuity.
But what happens to perennial programs when that support is interrupted? What opportunities are squandered when startup resources cannot be secured?
From the very earliest days, TSN has been a strong partner to our Member Communities in navigating a complex funding landscape and it’s not getting any easier. In the best of times, stewardship is often overlooked and underappreciated even within the conservation world, and this is not the best of times. Meanwhile, seasoned stewards know that the key to this work is patient, unfaltering diligence. Ecosystem protection and rehabilitation requires that we keep showing up, no matter what other worthy priorities dominate the zeitgeist. After decades of working entirely within the current system, we’ve come to the conclusion that we cannot STAND TOGETHER FOR NATURE without trying to make this better, so we’re doing something about it.
Conservation
=
Preservation
+
Stewardship
Motivations have differed historically, but the unifying goals of conservation are healthy nature for nature’s sake and a sustainable habitat for humans to thrive within it. As noted above, achieving these goals requires two equally vital elements.
Preservation holds aside land where a useful structure could have been built, stewardship plants trees and makes sure they reach maturity so the sacrifice was not in vain. Preservation declares the monarch butterfly endangered, stewardship plants milkweed so their populations can rebound. They are forever intertwined and we absolutely need both.
So why focus on stewardship?
The people who founded The Stewardship Network had plenty of experience in this space even before the TSN idea came to fruition over twenty years ago. One self-defeating pattern they witnessed over and over was that the stewardship half of conservation was consistently under-celebrated and thus under-funded and under-resourced. Politicians, foundations, agencies, and advocates tended to gravitate towards big moments, funding land purchases or rallying for landmark legislation, but then moving on and hoping it all works out.
Parents will recognize a similar dynamic. It’s relatively easy to get people out to celebrate when your child is born or when they graduate high school. There aren’t nearly enough celebrations in honor of healing a broken bone or learning how to read.
And that’s why we’re here – because conservation without stewardship is an incomplete investment. Our Member Communities monitor the river and clear invasive plant species long after ribbons are cut and press releases are made. Our collaborative stewardship efforts bring balance and better outcomes to the conservation movement at a critical point in the fight for our shared future.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is ten minutes of exercise better for you than zero even if twenty minutes was the goal? Heck yes! So tend that private land, tidy that urban square, plant those local wildflowers in your garden, and let’s make the best of every scenario we find out here.
When working in such an important, vast, and interconnected space, it can be hard sometimes to maintain strategic focus. The alternative is bleak, though, and many in the nonprofit realm have witnessed firsthand that those who try to do everything often end up doing nothing. Over time, The Stewardship Network has become better at articulating our role as champions of collaborative stewardship. It was through this articulation that we learned to evaluate any projects and/or groups we might take on against two core criteria:
COLLABORATIVE | Our dedication to the strength of collective action requires that all TSN Member Communities be collectives representing multiple organizations, agencies, and individuals.
STEWARDSHIP | Any group or project we bring into the fold must either conduct direct stewardship of natural ecosystems (this is by far the majority) or support the stewardship of natural ecosystems through education, empowerment, or advocacy.
There are, of course, many other ways to care for nature that fall outside these TSN focus areas. Issues like environmental policy and law, renewable energy production, and the identification or repair of failing human systems matter greatly to us as people and impact our hands-on stewardship work profoundly. That is why The Stewardship Network proudly supports and is an official member of various specialized alliances with expertise in these areas, including Michigan Environmental Council, Michigan Climate Action Network, Healing Our Waters, Southeast Michigan Stewardship Coalition, Great Lakes Stewardship Initiative, Freshwater Future, Environmental Capacity Builders Network, and more.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one. Human societies and the byproducts of our ingenuity have always left their marks on the natural world, but over the past couple of centuries our methodologies for food, energy, transportation, commerce, housing and more have become the planet’s biggest problem. Harm was never intended, but tremendous harm was and is being done. The ramifications of a warming climate are radically destabilizing natural ecosystems, triggering a mass extinction of flora and fauna. Millions of humans are already suffering severe consequences of these actions, disproportionately in regions least responsible for and least benefitting from industrial innovations. This is not the way anyone hoped humanity would be reminded of its intertwined fate with nature, but here we are.
It’s a lot to process, which is why people tend to sit as long as possible in a state of denial about all of the above before eventually skipping the productive “do something” phase and jumping straight to despair. That’s not how we go about things, though, and if you’re here, it’s probably not your style either. We’re not content to accept the grim projections of unmitigated climate change as an inevitability. There’s a lot of work to be done, so let’s do it together. Our Events page is a great place to start.
Reharmonizing humanity with the rest of nature while dealing with the fallout of past missteps is no small task and we all have parts to play. Some are leading a massive transformation in our approach to energy or awakening the power of public awareness and the will of the masses. Others are primarily concerned with addressing social inequities the climate crisis lays bare or adapting human systems to survive what cannot be reversed. The Stewardship Network is focused on directly intervening in natural ecosystems for more positive outcomes, assisting natural areas or species with helpful human actions.
In the face of such high stakes and dramatic needs, we understand if removing an invasive plant species, monitoring wildlife, installing urban green spaces, or cleaning up a river sometimes sounds too small to matter, but this is climate action and it’s absolutely vital. With help and rejuvenation, our ecosystems can sequester carbon, cool sweltering cities, protect life-giving resources, and reduce the impacts of drought, wildfires, and floods. The lands and waters we rely on have developed over a time scale humankind cannot fathom and undoing our negative influence upon them restores their strength. With strength, they endure. With endurance, we’ve bought ourselves time to get it right. It won’t be enough without revolutionary changes and bold choices, but our collaborative stewardship undoes harm, fortifies nature against the coming challenges, and gives our sisters and brothers a fighting chance.