It’s almost as if the oak trees next door to the Guild Works on Washington Street in the Four Corners neighborhood were calling out to the organization and community around them for help.

Last week help came in the form of an announcement that the city had conveyed four parcels (32,000 square feet total) of severely sloped woodlands leading up to Mt. Bowdoin to the Guild Works, the first step in what the organization envisions as a fully redefined Urban Wild concept with the potential for evolving further into one of the more innovative green housing plans likely ever presented to the city.

“We’re very, very excited about this designation,” said Guild founder and CEO Jhana Senxian. “One of the key features is a canopy walk through the trees. With that and everything else, as far as we know there’s nothing like this in the state…All of it is also co-designed by the neighbors and the residents.”

She added, “This is a huge milestone for us right now…It’s really our chance to start this project and it’s a real vote of confidence and show of trust by the city…to convey this land to us and say to us, ‘Here’s your shot to really do this.’”

What they intend to do is create an outside-the-box Urban Wild with performance space, the tree canopy walk, art immersion, retaining walls, and a reworked streetscape on Washington Street – all on a piece of land that has never been developed and sits at a 45-degree angle going up to the Mt. Bowdoin neighborhood.

The possibilities are limitless, said Senxian, but the overall idea will be in line with the mission of the Guild – which is about healing and wellness in the community.

Part of the healing in this instance is taking a site that has for a generation or more has been a bit scary, a home for illegal dumping and a repository for broken glass and litter.

A previous plan for the space from as long as 14 years ago called for garden plots and some trails, but Senxian said her observation of traditional Urban Wilds is they are not accessible to the whole community, so in 2015 they began “visioning something more dynamic.”

Senxian recalled walking past the forest as a child going from Grove Hall to Four Corners, noting that no one wanted to be around it. “When you got to the forest you would cross the street,” she said. “It was creepy and daunting, and the slope fell onto the sidewalk. It was a site where you stayed away and looked away from it. It wasn’t inviting and it was hulking over you.”

That changed in 2015 when the Guild set up shop next door and began to care for the space informally. The designation conveyance? last week by the Public Facilities Commission unlocks a more formal arrangement – as well as $850,000 to get started on Phase 1, which Senxian said is a 90-day project for which surveying should begin “any moment,” with completion by next spring. Work will include stabilizing the hill, building retaining walls with imprinted art from Guild board member and acclaimed artist Moyo Okediji, defining the streetscape on Washington Street, and creating a landing area entrance on Washington Street.

Added to that will be the removal of invasive species from the forest and the preservation of the existing oak forest.

More fundraising is needed for later phases, but beyond that, the Guild has a much larger vision: creating housing on top of its existing one-story programmatic space – a project that would be enveloped and function in unison with the forest. They are eyeing 70 units on top of the Guild space.

“The idea is to create an inter-generational community for those that deal with a lot of isolation – seniors, families with chronic health-care issues, young people aging out of the foster care system – and just really re-defining what supportive housing is,” said Senxian. “A lot of supportive housing is for single individuals and very little is for families.”

The Guild hopes soon to begin working on the pre-development stage for the housing piece of the plan and then seek funding next fall. For now, they are listening to the call of the trees and going out on a limb with Phase 1.

“We believe this can be a model for green infrastructure development,” she said. “Every single thing we have done we’ve never done before. We like being on the edge of things. It’s been wild and woolly at times, but very beautiful.”

The Guild is located at 260 Washington St. in Four Corners, and has been there since 2015, but traces its community work in Dorchester back to 2012.