WEEK 5: STEWARDSHIP + COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

To kick off the week, we had an exciting opportunity to work with Jodie Galvan of Forterra (formerly Cascade Land Conservancy) to discuss the process and implications of environmental stewardship. As a Senior Managing Director of Stewardship, Jodie works to ensure that the land managed by Forterra is maintained and restored as needed, a complicated job that involves budgeting for thousands of acres of land in the Pacific Northwest. She emphasized the complexity of this responsibility by asking us to brainstorm a number of critical components of San Juan Island National Historical Park that we will need to take into consideration as we begin making recommendations for the re-design of this site. These components included:

1. Long-term management and maintenance needs, including things that may go wrong and preventative measures
2. Cost per year to run the park
3. How to reduce those costs
4. Non-financially-based benefits of utilizing community volunteers in the park

The estimates for the cost to maintain the park largely exceeded the probable budget. This is where reducing 
costs and community stewardship comes into play. As a class, we agreed that the benefits of utilizing community volunteers extends beyond cost reductions, as it allows for education of the public as well as maintaining old and new partnerships throughout the island community.

On Monday we also had the chance to present the work we produced for our most recent assignment. We had been split into four teams to accomplish a number of goals that allow us to dig a little deeper into the history, site, setting, and program of the park. The history team displayed a montage of histories, including that of the Pig War, the Native Americans, and even the geology of the island and region as a whole. The site team displayed the structure, ecology, and cultural resources of American Camp and English Camp as individual places. This was taken to a broader level by the setting team, who illustrated the land use, ecology, transportation, and tourism aspects of the entire island as it relates to the rest of the region. Finally, the program team explored the earth, water, and human interactions on the island, and identified areas of opportunity for visitors to explore and learn from the park.

After eliciting the broader, more abstract ideas revolving around the various components of the park and island, it is time for us to complete a foundation from which we can begin applying the design principles. The rest of the week was spent working on three main issues: Site and Program, Heritage and Program, and Setting and Environment. Based on the preliminary stages of our exploration of these issues, a main theme among the three teams seems to involve discovering the linkages and commonalities between various narratives, relationships, and physical properties of the park and the island.  By identifying common threads, it will be easier for us to define the needs of the island, the park, the tourists, the residents, the stakeholders, and the natural ecologies.

The heritage + program group brainstorms.

To organize themes, students in the heritage + program and 
site + program groups gather all the different narratives that are 
held within the two camps.

Project management + presentation group begins outlining for the midterm review.

In preparation for the stakeholder meeting on February 10, each student is responsible for contacting community stakeholders on San Juan Island. Organizations and citizens interested in the future of San Juan Island National Historical Park are encouraged to attend.