Greensleeves is a 501c3 non-profit project dedicated to healing the land by hand. We provide workforce development, climate mitigation and ecological restoration services. We recruit train and field land stewarding teams from disadvantaged communities; training and guiding our crew(s) using environmental science and traditional ecological knowledge. Together we can build community safety, fire-resilience, and ecological regeneration in the Sierra Nevada. We believe global problems like climate crisis, bio-diversity loss and land degradation, put us all at risk, now and into the future. As our current crises were created by the belief in human separateness from the natural world --- we aim to return the human hand to the land -- re-learning our human role on the planet -- healing, restoring, and participating in the natural processes of regeneration. This is our pathway back to healthy bio-diverse ecosystems and abundant, diverse and thriving human communities.
Services we provide homeowners
and land managers
• Invasive plant removal; by hand & by the root
• Targeted work on difficult terrain
(steep grade / uneven ground / sensitive biology)
• Process-based restoration techniques
• Erosion & flood mitigation
• Fuel-reduction and brush clean-up
• Prescription Burn preparation
• Native plant seeding, cultivation, support
Services we provide our community
• Living wage jobs
• Workforce development
• Climate adaptation & eco-restoration
• Wildfire readiness & resilience
Services we provide our crew
• Living wage jobs
• Training and personal / peer support
• Safety certifications
• Experience & references
A crew member gives a thumbs up as he plants a sapling in the Jones Fire burn scar.
Inspired and informed by both environmental science, and indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), Greensleeves teams use simple hand tools and elbow grease to to perform various stewardship techniques on public and private lands. Greensleeves aims to collaborate with and increase the capacity and breadth of our regional non-profit conservation organizations already engaged in restoration projects in the Sierra Nevada. Forest Ecologists and Restoration Technicians in the field will have increased access to mobile, agile and increasingly knowledgeable and capable hand crews with an ecological focus. And Greensleeves crew members will have the opportunity to become increasingly skilled and knowledgeable; earning a living wage, and a place in the growing restoration economy. As crews gain experience and expertise they will be able to provide land owners and land managers top notch data-driven restoration and climate mitigation services, restoring ecological health and function to the wildland urban interface, while improving fire safety and climate resilience for the community as a whole. Greensleeves will create the economic pathway for restoration work to scale-up, returning the human hand to its rightful place on the land, restoring, renewing and regenerating the places we call home.
Get in Touch
We are proud and grateful to report that alongside our partners; Sierra Streams Institute (SSI) and the California Heritage Indigenous Research Project (CHIRP), [now HUSWEJ], we received initial funding, in fall of 2025 through the Climate Smart Communities Initiative (CSCI) to launch our pilot. We've hired trained and fielded our first crew, who got their start performing fuel reduction and restoration under the guidance of Forest Ecologists with the Sierra Streams Institute and HUSWEJ's wildland stewarding crew. We believe this pilot proved proof of concept. By recruiting our first team from marginalized communities; especially people exiting homelessness, re-entering the community after incarceration or completing addiction recovery programs, we are aligning social justice with urgent environmental need. By serving conservation organizations homeowners and land managers interested in better stewarding their lands, we will begin to reconnect separated ecological islands with larger regions -- stimulating watershed and forest health and restoring fire resilience to our communities. In the process we will support a scale-up of the restoration economy locally and regionally.
Do you love this idea and want to know more?
Do you know someone we should connect with?
Please get in touch!
Donate Now
We greatly appreciate your interest in donating to our cause! We are still in the beginning stages of this project and are working to get things fully up and running.
Please contact us at info@greensleeves.life for information on how you can donate.