The Community Watershed Stewardship Program: experiments in engagement and equity in Portland, OR

•The Community Watershed Stewardship Program is an innovative partnership.•University–city partnerships provide space for experimentation.•The program demonstrates how public engagement and equity goals can be developed.

The Community Watershed Stewardship Program (CWSP) is a long-running city–university partnership between the City of Portland's Bureau of Environmental Services and Portland State University, with the goal of improving watershed health. CWSP has recently focused its efforts on addressing equity, exploring how community watershed stewardship can be generated by low-income and minority communities.This paper provides a case study of CWSP, exploring its genesis; how it leverages community support and engagement; and, its leadership in analyzing the equity implications of its work and how it can improve. CWSP, which received the Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Foundation Campus Community Partnership Award, serves as an excellent example of an innovative university–city partnership that is able to leverage a relatively small amount of funding by fostering bottom-up community engagement. Most importantly, CWSP demonstrates how university–community partnerships can explore innovative ways to merge environmental and social equity goals and outcomes.