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This report serves as one of five individual documents developed over the course of Phase II of the Urban Forest Equity Collective. This document provides an overview of the Sylmar pilot neighborhood assessment, engagement, and tree planting implementation process. It is intended to provide a transparent view into the decisions, points of analysis and key themes derived over the course of this phase.

This report serves as one of five individual documents developed over the course of Phase II of the Urban Forest Equity Collective. This document provides an overview of the Central Alameda pilot neighborhood assessment, engagement, and tree planting implementation process. It is intended to provide a transparent view into the decisions, points of analysis, and key themes derived over the course of this phase.

The gendered displacement experiences of Syrian women and girls have been a significant focus of both the academic and development and humanitarian gaze. In response, humanitarian and development organisations have increasingly implemented women and girl safe spaces. Yet, little is known about Syrian women's experiences within them, nor the structures and practice shaping those experiences. Drawing on feminist ethnographic fieldwork in a women and girl safe space in the Beqaa valley in Lebanon, I explore Syrian women's experiences of at-homeness, disclosure, sharing, and alternative futures in relation to the various safety-making practices and structures in the women and girl safe space. My findings highlight the potential for women and girl safe spaces to counteract the everyday isolation and hardship forcibly displaced women face, as well as helping to build the emotional safety and community that they need to navigate forced displacement and strive towards transformative change. I conclude that additional research on the practices and structures that enable collective safety-making and empowerment is imperative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women and girl safe spaces (or "safe spaces") are increasingly being implemented in contexts of forced displacement. With little research on safe spaces, their design and implementation has often relied on toolkits and practice guides that standardise how empowerment is defined and pursued within them. Drawing on my feminist ethnography of a safe space for Syrian refugee women in Beqaa valley, Lebanon, I share four women's stories of (dis)empowerment in and because of the safe space. These women's stories highlight the unintended negative consequences when meanings attached to empowerment are imposed by the organisation or not shared among women. Embracing collective self-determination over definitions of empowerment and its pursuit, instead, enables women to negotiate, organise, and work together to determine the shared meaning and future direction, because having collective power over the definition and pursuit of empowerment is also having power over what is deemed possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]