Stewardship Salons: Sharing biocultural approaches to foster many ways of knowing and caring for land

Abstract We present Stewardship Salons as meaningful engagements with different ways of knowing and caring for ecosystems. They are facilitated as non‐hierarchical gatherings where everyone has the ability to be a teacher and a learner. This approach was first inspired by an exchange between NYC‐based practitioners and Native Hawaiian educators and practitioners in 2017. Since then, partners from U.S. Forest Service and NYC Parks have organized experiential salons that engage land managers, artists, researchers, and practitioners in learning from place and each other. Salons are rooted in co‐learning, engaging personal lived experiences, and amplifying frequently untold narratives about ecosystems. They have been led by Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge holders, performance and visual artists, community activists and stewards, and different cultural and religious groups who share artistic and embodied ways of knowing and biocultural stewardship practices as pathways towards more holistic approaches to the land rooted in reciprocity and care. This technical article presents our Stewardship Salon approach and draws upon qualitative, mixed‐methods participant observation and program evaluation data (2017–2024). We identified three primary salon impacts on individuals: personal and professional development, relationship building to people and to place, and bolstering stewardship capacity. We discuss outcomes of salons beyond direct participants as well as barriers to participation and limitations of the current approach. We conclude with exploring how salons have the potential to scale from individual impacts to foster organizational change, bolstering care‐based approaches to stewardship in urban areas and beyond.