Sean Watts, a founding member of the Community Land Conservancy, leads a tour on the site of the Skyway Homeownership and Green Space Project. Photo credit: Michael B. Maine, Menrva Labs, LLC. Great public spaces help communities thrive. These spaces need features like clean air, trees, accessible transit, and nearby affordable housing. Most of all, they depend on the people who use and care for them.
Community Land Conservancy (CLC), one of our community partners, is helping create great spaces. Their vision is to help communities buy, own, and design public spaces that serve their needs. CLC builds and guides a coalition of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) community members and leaders from local conservation organizations. Together, they identify hurdles that communities face with environmental, funding, and planning policies.
In 2024, Seattle’s Environmental Justice Fund awarded CLC a grant to support their efforts to create thriving, affordable, and green neighborhoods. The grant helped CLC continue to bring leaders together to guide their work and pay them for their time and knowledge. The Seattle Parks Foundation is CLC’s fiscal sponsor and has supported the organization for many years.
Operated by our office, Seattle created the Environmental Justice Fund in 2017 to support community projects that advance climate justice and prepare for climate change impacts. The Fund supports programs led by BIPOC, immigrants, refugees, people with low incomes, youth, and elders. These communities are hit first and worst by climate change impacts, like extreme heat, floods, and air pollution.
This story is part of a series highlighting the incredible work of community organizations supported by the Environmental Justice Fund.
CLC works to put land in community hands and provide resources to help community shape public spaces. Their collective mission is to ensure that communities of color have access to trails, green spaces, and clean outdoor air for active, healthy lifestyles for generations to come.
An example of CLC’s work in action is the Skyway Homeownership and Green Space Project in partnership with the Skyway Coalition and the Homestead Community Land Trust. “More than 50 permanently affordable homes will be developed in Skyway-West Hill for current and former Skyway residents, specifically BIPOC families,” writes reporter Jadenne Radoc Cabahug for South Seattle Emerald, another one of our Environmental Justice Fund grantees.
The project shows how coalitions can shape climate solutions and develop projects that meet community needs, like affordable housing, tree preservation, and climate change adaptation.
“We embrace the complexity of it all and [we] try to bring it together. The outcome is so much more durable and impactful that way,” said Sean Watts, a founding member of CLC.
“We need more Skyway projects where residents will be able to walk trails along streams and wetlands to go volunteer at their neighborhood urban farm where produce can be grown and shared,” he continued. “Where residents are funded to manage the restoration and maintenance of the green spaces that contribute to thriving habitat and, in the process, train the next generation of environmental stewards.”
Community members know best how environmental policy shapes their daily lives. In Seattle, we prioritize hearing directly from communities and empowering neighborhood leadership as we work to increase housing, green spaces, affordability, and more opportunities to thrive.
“One person sharing their success is the answer to another person’s challenge,” Sean added.
Learn more about the Environmental Justice Fund on OSE’s website, and stay tuned for the release of the 2026 application this year.