Known Grove Sacred Land Stewardship was founded by Keenan S. Gruver in May 2023 as a way of bringing ecological restoration and native planting into an accessible nonprofit model. Having worked in for-profit restoration and arborism for years, he found the practice too often encouraged harmful quick fixes without holistic planning. This creates a dependency model that paradoxically divorces the system from human care and investment, while simultaneously excluding individual and family landholders of lesser financial means.

 

Known Grove SLS was formed with the belief that human beings can be integrated into the natural world, and all people can participate as stewards working with the land rather than attempting to control it.

 

We work with landholders of all sizes and shapes to create a network of known native groves and their keepers, exchanging the sustainably collected fruit of our land to grow resilience and direct investment in our shared ecosystem. We aim to keep our nurseries free and our help accessible to all who wish to develop a genuine relationship with the land they call home. 

 

We are all stewards of this Earth, and that means taking responsibility and learning to listen to what it has to say.

 

Known Grove Sacred Land Stewardship is currently a PA registered nonprofit organization pending federal 501c3 filing. We work directly with a registered 501c3 organization—the Wayne County Community Foundation—which can accept donated funds on our behalf to supported nonprofit projects. 

 

Our projects and stewardship services are focused in the Glaciated Low Plateau Physiographic Province, including most of Northeastern Pennsylvania and the Pocono Region. We occasionally undertake projects into Western Pennsylvania as well as across the Delaware Watergap into New York's Sullivan, and Delaware counties.