Stewardship Coordinators

Duties:

​

• Coordinate with Steering Committee before making offering stewardships to members on waitlist.

• Identify any neglected plots and encourage gardeners to either improve or yield their stewardship, as appropriate.

• Distribute the "Steward Renewal" questions each year, and read the responses

​

​

Sample Letter to Stewards at Year-End

(Stewardships Coordinators might copy-paste this)

​

6/15 GREEN PLOT STEWARDSHIP SURVEY AND SELF-EVALUATION

Dear 6/15 Green Plot Stewards,

As the Individual Plot Stewardship Coordinators, we are hoping to provide a more robust and helpful oversight of stewardships this year. Toward that end, we’re asking all members who were plot stewards in the past year to complete the following survey and self-evaluation.

Our hope is that this survey will help provide an overview of the work you all have been doing and are planning to do in your stewarded plots. We ask your cooperation in completing and returning this form to us by March 31. If we do not hear from you by then we will assume you are relinquishing your stewardship and we will allow another member access to that plot.

The garden’s individual stewardships are the heart of how 6/15 Green presents itself to the community, in addition to providing dozens of garden members an opportunity to get their hands dirty and nurture their passions and creativity. At the same time, it’s important to remember that stewarding a plot in 6/15 Green is a privilege and that, as with all spaces in the garden, we are stewards, not owners, of the land we tend.

We also want to remind you that plot stewardships come with a set of responsibilities – to maintain your plot with consistency during the year, to be an active member of the garden community, and to fulfill all the basic requirements of garden membership.  Our longstanding policy is that stewards who do not fulfill these basic requirements will be ineligible to continue as stewards of individual plots.

There is a long waiting list of garden members hoping to become stewards. We owe them, and the larger garden community, a commitment to ensuring that the space devoted to individual stewardships is being purposefully and consistently tended and nurtured. Most stewards are attentive and enthusiastic tenders of their allotted plots, though some plots were not consistently tended.

We encourage you to use this survey as an opportunity to share and celebrate the work you’ve done during your stewardship of the past year. If you were not able to meet the requirements of stewardship in the past year, please provide some explanation of why this was the case. And please be honest about your ability to resume a robust stewardship and participate actively in 6/15 Green’s life this year.

Along with more oversight of individual stewardships, we, along with other members, are working hard this year to make tending of common spaces a more central part of garden life. If you do not have time to sustain an individual stewardship this coming year, there will be numerous opportunities to get your hands in the soil in the garden’s common spaces. In short, our guiding priority this year is to make sure that all garden spaces are being used to good purpose and not sitting untended. We ask your cooperation in that endeavor.

   With Much Appreciation and Gratitude,

   The Stewardship Coordinator Team

​

​

Sample Questions for Stewards to Renew

(Stewardships Coordinators might copy-paste this)

​

THE SURVEY
 
1. Your Name (or names if yours is a household stewardship):
 
2. When did you begin your stewardship?
 
3. Please share some details of your stewardship last year (including successes, highlights, challenges). If you were not able to consistently steward your plot, please share why that was the case. If you were unable to fulfill stewardship requirements last year but are hoping to continue your stewardship in the coming year, please share why you feel you’ll be able to meet the requirements this year.
 
4.  Did you fulfill the basic garden requirements last year in terms of Open Hours, Community Assignments, Group Project Days? If you were unable to fulfill them, please explain why.
 
5.  Are you planning to continue your stewardship this coming year? To the extent you know, what are your plans for your plot?

6. Please share any thoughts, feedback, questions you have about your stewardship, about the garden’s individual stewardship structure more broadly, and/or about the place of individual stewardships in the overall life of the garden.