Tree Stories Toolkit is your guide to designing, producing, and evaluating public story-sharing projects about urban trees.

Public story-sharing projects have an important role to play in urban forestry. Collecting and sharing personal stories about trees helps communities recognize their special connection to urban nature and to each other.

Story-sharing projects also provide the rare opportunity for urban forestry managers to learn their community’s thoughts, feelings, and preferences around urban trees firsthand.

This toolkit provides a step by step guide to designing a project theme and deliverables; performing public outreach to build a story collection; distributing and celebrating the project within your community; and finally, using a simple qualitative analysis to identify trends in your community’s overall perception of urban trees.

FAQs

Maybe! What’s special about Tree Stories Toolkit is that it provides a unified framework for producing projects at any scale. It also gives you the tools to take your project beyond simply soliciting and reposting stories online. Tree Stories Toolkit emphasizes the creative interpretation of story submissions so that they become a unified collection. It also shows how to use a simple form of qualitative data analysis at the end of the project so that even more can be understood about your project’s participants.
The goal of this toolkit is to make a meaningful story-sharing project feasible for even the busiest urban forest managers and tree lovers. Not everyone feels like an interpretive project is in their wheelhouse, and that’s okay too. The toolkit provides grant application language, printable engagement activities, and other resources to help you get started.
These days, many state and federal urban forestry grants require applicants to include a public outreach component along with their main project proposal, whether it is for street tree planting, park improvements, or another urban greening effort. A story-sharing project based on this toolkit should be easy to adapt to most grant requirements and could be a great option for your community. There are also other grant programs out there specifically for story-sharing projects, like this one from the National Park Foundation.
Check out the links below for inspiration. The cool thing is that every project will be unique, depending on the community, the theme, the interpretive style and presentation… you get the picture. The projects below show some of the possibilities. Click around and see what speaks to you.