Urban Outdoors: Conservation Rooted in Cities
Powering Community-Led Access to Nature, Food, and Climate Action
Urban Outdoors is a Trustees initiative that advances urban conservation through community-based partnerships across Massachusetts. Working alongside local organizations, municipalities, land trusts, and residents, Urban Outdoors connects people to nature in the places where they live, learn, and gather while supporting the stewardship, activation, and long-term care of urban green spaces. Urban Outdoors builds on The Trustees' long history of conservation and community stewardship while exploring new approaches to protecting and caring for urban green spaces across Massachusetts.
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Urban Outdoors
Building on a Legacy of Urban Engagement
Urban Outdoors builds on a long history of the Trustees engaging communities in cities, including decades of stewardship and partnership through the Boston Community Gardens network and neighborhood-based programming. This initiative expands that work—deepening our presence in cities and strengthening how we connect people to land, food, the urban habitat/environment and community.
Meeting People Where They Are: Why Cities Matter
Today, most people live in cities, and that trend will continue in the decades ahead. At the same time, communities are facing the growing impacts of climate change, from more frequent storms and flooding to rising heat and food insecurity.
Cities are both at the center of these challenges and essential to the solutions. Access to green space, healthy food, and resilient landscapes is uneven, and communities with the fewest resources are often the most affected and the least able to recover.
Year One Cities: Partners and Programs
Urban Outdoors launches its first year of partnerships in June and July 2026 with organizations that bring deep community knowledge, trusted leadership, and longstanding commitments to stewardship, food access, youth development, and community wellbeing.
For More Information
Vidya Tikku, VP Urban Outdoors
Lee Matsueda, Urban Outdoors Program Manager
Maria Rodriguez Ortega, Urban Outdoors Program Coordinator