uCSB / Community Partnership
Partnership with Campus canopy
Campus Canopy is an emerging non-profit that engages and educates school communities about regenerative landscaping practices and climate adaptation through community schoolyard planting projects.
These projects include reviving empty planters and field perimeters around a campus, planting foundational shrubs, and adding swaths of trees in open fields and spaces near blacktop.
UCSB Project Description
This partnership connects UCSB researchers and a non-profit start-up, Campus Canopy, to local schools. Together, these partners engage and educate school communities about regenerative practices and climate adaptation through community schoolyard planting projects. The partners also provide professional learning opportunities for K-12 teachers to integrate these planting projects into their classroom curriculum. Collectively, this work seeks to empower school communities to take climate action and become stewards of the land.
“Healing the Earth and Building Community One Schoolyard at a Time”
About This Project
This case study shows how schoolyard greening can become more than a planting project. Campus Canopy’s work begins by building relationships with school communities and understanding the needs of each individual community.
Rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach to sustainable schoolyards, Campus Canopy supports habitat restoration through a partnership-based process. Schoolyards become shared spaces where students, teachers, families, and community members can learn by doing.
Through these community planting experiences, participants engage with the land, contribute to ecological change, and build stronger relationships with one another. In this way, socio-ecological change is grounded in the community itself.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Key details about the Precipitation Extremes Teacher Institute.
INSTITUTION
UCSB
COMMUNITY PARTNER
Campus canopy
FOCUS AREA
Regenerative Landscaping & Climate Adaptation
PARTICIPANT
Students, Teachers, Families & School Communities
LEARNING FORMAT
Landscape Design Sessions & Community Planting Days
Through hands-on education, Campus Canopy empowers school communities to take climate action and become stewards of the land.
Campus Canopy supports school communities through planting projects that create shade, support carbon sequestration, restore soil, and reimagine schoolyards as ecologically rich habitats
EMERGING QUESTIONS & PROJECT ACTIVITIES
How does Campus Canopy connect community learning with schoolyard greening?
EMERGING RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Learning Through Community Planting
What do participants, including students, teachers, and families, learn about tending the land and building community during community planting days on school campuses?
Connecting Sustainable Infrastructure to Curriculum
How can teachers be encouraged and supported to integrate learning about sustainable school infrastructure efforts into classroom curriculum and activities?
PROJECT ACTIVITIES
Collaborative Landscape Design Sessions
Collaborative landscape design sessions re-envision schoolyards as ecologically rich habitats that support nature connection, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration.
Community Planting Days
Community planting days on school campuses focus on creating shade and carbon sequestration through planting native plants and rebuilding soil.
Relational Trust in Action or Pillars of Relational Trust
Part 1
Zine Article–Healing the Earth and Building Community One Schoolyard at a Time
Collectively Working Toward Socio-Ecological Change
This zine article highlights how Campus Canopy’s community-based approach to supporting habitat restoration projects in schoolyards begins with building relationships with school communities.
Campus Canopy’s partnership-based approach centers the needs of each individual community rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach to sustainable schoolyards.
This approach supports a shared experience of learning through doing. It situates socio-ecological change as community-grounded and supports relational trust among schoolyard stakeholders.
Community-Based Approach
Habitat Restoration
Schoolyard Greening
Learning Through Doing
Community-Grounded Change
Relational Trust
Part 2
Aerial Map–Naming and Disrupting Hierarchies
Collectively Working Toward Socio-Ecological Change
The aerial map was created during the planning process of a school greening initiative led by another organization.
This initiative was rejected by the school community because the organization used a top-down approach and failed to build trust.
Through participation in this process, Campus Canopy researchers learned that it is not enough to invite community voices into the conversation. Community perspectives must be listened to and incorporated into shared decision-making.
As a result, collaborative decision-making is central to all of Campus Canopy’s initiatives.
Shared Decision-Making
Listening to Community Perspectives
Disrupting Top-Down Approaches
Collaborative Planning
Community Voice
Artifacts
These artifacts document the planning, coordination, and hands-on work behind Campus Canopy’s schoolyard greening efforts. Together, they show how collaborative design, material preparation, and community planting support regenerative landscaping, climate adaptation, and relationship-building across school communities.
Campus Canopy Draft Logic Model
This is a draft logic model for Campus Canopy that was produced in the beginning stages of organizational development during fall 2024. It was generated collaboratively by the three co-founders of Campus Canopy: a landscape architect, an attorney, and educational researcher. The logic model was initially used in applications for fiscal sponsorship.
Photograph of Mulch Delivery
This is a photograph of wood chips delivered to a school campus by a local tree company. It may seem simple to have wood chips delivered to a school campus in preparation for a community planting day, but, in reality, it requires a tremendous amount of coordination among school staff, administration, and the tree company. The timing and location of delivery as well as the quality of material are critical for a school campus. |
Green Space Equity Map
This is a map generated by the Trust for Public Land in 2023 showing that an elementary school is located in a neighborhood that has a high priority need for new parks. This map was used in the application for funding from First Five Santa Barbara for an outdoor classroom project. The outdoor classroom project was successfully completed in spring 2024
Campus Canopy Article in the ECCLPs Zine
This is an article that was published by the ECCLPS Collective in their first zine, which focused on community voices in PK-12 climate and environmental education. Campus Canopy co-founders responded to the request for articles in winter 2025 and co-wrote the submission. It was used as an opportunity for the co-founders to begin communicating the work of Campus Canopy to the greater public.
Campus Canopy Press Release Draft
This press release was published in July 2025 by the Santa Barbara Education Foundation (SBEF) to announce its fiscal sponsorship of Campus Canopy. The SBEF Development Officer reached out to Campus Canopy with some initial questions about the organization and drafted this article based on the responses.
Green Champions Workshop Agenda
This artifact is the agenda from the Green Champions Workshop. The Green Champions Workshop was part of a school district-wide planting initiative. Each school site was asked to identify a representative classroom teacher, support staff, or administrator who showed interest in school greening projects to be their site’s “Green Champion.” The purpose of the workshop was to prepare these Green Champions for an upcoming planting day during which each school would receive coast live oak saplings to plant in designated areas on their school campus. Campus Canopy shared expertise in planting techniques, educators shared expertise in community engagement, and school administrators shared an overview of the project goals. Educators were encouraged to think about ways to engage their students in the planting project through curriculum, civic engagement, and/or community service.
Article 31: United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
This artifact is a snapshot of Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 31 declares that access to rest, play, leisure, and recreation, and opportunities for experiencing the natural world and biodiversity are essential to human development. This illustrates Campus Canopy’s conceptualization of environmental justice and its belief that greening schoolyards is a powerful approach to addressing environmental inequities in communities.