Shanasia Sylman is an incoming City and Regional Planning PhD student interested in the intersections of social justice, land conservation and biodiversity efforts. For the last three and a half years, Shanasia has been working as an outdoor recreation planner for the National Park Service and has become well acquainted with how open spaces are managed across the U.S. While assisting with community-led outdoor recreation and conservation projects, it became apparent how the process of creating and managing parks and open spaces does not account for systemic barriers to land access for marginalized communities. Through her proposed research, Shanasia hopes to take a critical look at land stewardship programs and explore how collective land ownership models, like land trusts, could create more equitable opportunities for marginalized communities to engage in more self-determined land stewardship. Shanasia is deeply interested in community conservation and how examples of this across the globe can influence an evolution in the U.S. land conservation movement that better supports and empowers a diversity of land stewards. She holds a masters in urban planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and a bachelors in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
