We grow forests, restore soil, and stand with the people who tend them.
Living Roots is a non-profit working at the intersection of land restoration, indigenous stewardship, and climate education — quietly, persistently, in the soil.
Climate justice begins underfoot.
We do not believe in heroic environmentalism. The communities tending the land — through generations of care, ceremony, and sometimes resistance — are the ones holding the soil together. Our work is to follow their lead, fund their plans, and step out of the way.
Living Roots was founded in 2014 in the Pacific Northwest by six volunteers and one borrowed pickup truck. A decade later, we run watershed-scale restoration projects in partnership with 184 communities — but the principle has not changed: those closest to the land lead the work.
“We are not planting trees. We are restoring an entire grammar of relationship between people and place.”
— Maya Tenkiller, Co-founder & Field DirectorFour programs, one watershed at a time.
Watershed Restoration
Riparian replanting, beaver-led recovery, and floodplain reconnection in partnership with tribal land managers across the Salish Sea, Klamath, and Columbia basins.
Community Stewardship Grants
Direct, no-strings funding to Indigenous and farmworker-led land projects — from food forests in Oakland to cocoa cooperatives in Costa Rica’s Talamanca.
Climate Education Network
Free curriculum for K-12 and university programs that centers Indigenous science alongside Western ecology. 4,200 educators trained.
Land & Water Policy
Technical, legal, and lobbying support for community land trusts seeking permanent stewardship rights — shaped by movement leaders, not boardrooms.
How beavers brought a salmon run back from the brink.
When the Yurok Tribe partnered with Living Roots to reintroduce North American beavers to a creek nobody had bothered to map, scientists called it modest. The salmon called it home.
Read the field reportFrom the field.
When a creek finds its memory.
Two years after we removed a 1920s irrigation dam, the Coho returned to spawning grounds nobody alive had ever seen used.
March 12, 2026
The Talamanca cocoa cooperative.
In Costa Rica’s Bribri territory, a cooperative of 122 farmers is showing what carbon-neutral cocoa actually looks like — without the certification theater.
February 28, 2026
A high school in Tucson is teaching watershed thinking.
Phoenix area public schools have begun integrating Indigenous science into earth & life science. The students are running with it.
February 14, 2026Living Roots was the first foundation that asked us what we needed — not what they wanted to fund. That sentence is the whole movement.
