services

A small practice, deliberately focused.

Coppice does a small number of things at a high level: leading complex land, water, and community efforts, and the plans, funding, and people they depend on, from first idea to lasting outcome.

Program & Project Management

What clients most often hire Coppice for: one accountable partner that takes ownership of a complex, multi-year effort, from the team and the budget to the agencies, the stakeholders, and the outcome.

Program development and management for municipalities, nonprofits & private clients
Project management from concept through closeout
Client-side project management: representing a community or organization and directing its consulting team
Team assembly and management, drawing on long-standing partners in planning, engineering, ecology, landscape architecture & construction
Agency and stakeholder coordination
Implementation and construction-phase management
Monitoring, reporting & adaptive management oversight

Community Planning

Community plans built to be used: grounded in each place's environmental, social, and economic realities, shaped by its residents, and written with the funding path in view, so the plan never sees the shelf.

Local Waterfront Revitalization Programs (LWRPs)
Smart growth & comprehensive plans
Climate & community resiliency planning
Open space & green infrastructure planning
Brownfield Opportunity Area (BOA) planning
Parks, trails & public land planning

Restoration & Mitigation Planning

Strategy and planning for ecological restoration, spanning compensatory mitigation, water quality improvement, and habitat projects, in a mitigation marketplace that has changed, and that we know from every side: bank feasibility studies, in-lieu fee program development, and years of permittee-responsible mitigation. Coppice develops the concepts and authors the plans, working with trusted planners, engineers, ecologists, and contractors to carry them through.

Restoration and mitigation site strategy & selection
Restoration concept development
Mitigation plan authorship in bank, in-lieu fee & permittee-responsible contexts
Water quality improvement project planning
Multi-agency coordination and approvals (USACE, NYSDEC, USFWS)
Course correction for sites that aren't performing: field diagnosis, concept development for revised designs, updated mitigation plans & agency re-approvals to get projects back on track
Permitting for the plans and programs we develop

Community Engagement

Listening to everyone's voice, and finding common ground to build on. Every conversation carries signals: what a community wants to protect, what it wants to change, and where it already agrees. We design engagement to hear those signals, and to turn them into direction a project team can use.

Engagement strategy and outreach plans, including state-funded program requirements
Community surveys, from question development through findings reports, in more than one language when the community calls for it
One-on-one stakeholder interviews, focus groups & classroom and youth engagement
Play-based facilitation and visioning workshops (Certified PLAYCE Practitioner)
Steering committee, advisory committee & multi-organization stakeholder group facilitation
Public comment periods, from intake through published responses
Creative formats that meet people where they are: site tours, pop-ups, live-polling webinars & working sessions

Strategic Funding & Grants

Matching community priorities to the funding built for them, then doing the unglamorous work that keeps the money flowing.

Strategic funding plans & multi-year grant strategies
Capital-project portfolio prioritization through ranking matrices, on-site evaluations & capacity assessments
Private, state & federal grant applications, from foundations to NYS DOS, EFC, and FEMA hazard mitigation
Grant administration, reporting & compliance
Match assembly and funder coordination

how we work

Small firm, senior attention.

Coppice Planning is deliberately small. The person who walks your site is the person who writes your plan, coordinates your agencies, and answers the phone when plans need to adapt. Twenty-five years of environmental practice means your project starts with relationships and regulatory experience already in place. When the work needs engineering, ecology, or landscape architecture, Coppice assembles it from long-standing specialist partners and manages the whole.

Start with everyone

Good direction comes from listening to all of it: the client, the agencies, the community, and the design team. Then we draw the threads into a plan everyone can act on.

Plan for regrowth

Like a coppiced stool, good projects are built to come back on their own. We favor self-sustaining approaches over engineered dependence.

Finish what we start

From first site walk through approvals, construction, and monitoring, we stay with projects until the outcome is established and the paperwork is closed.

Have a project in mind?

Tell us about your site and your goals. We’ll tell you honestly what it needs, what it will take, and whether we’re the right fit.

Get in touch