Our next focus, beginning in October after our report on Water Supply comes out, will be on one of our mission goals, nonprofit governance of the American River Parkway, in partnership with the public entities now responsible for it, adjacent to it, and stakeholders in it.
This article, Chapter 1 from the Project for Public Spaces book Public Parks, Private Partners (2000) is an excellent introduction to the subject.
Here is an excerpt:
Why Build Partnerships for Parks?
In a city, a public space can be an asset or a liability. A main street or a park can be a symbol of a neighborhood's vitality and character, or an emblem of its disorganization and poverty of spirit. When it is an asset, it takes on the neighborhood's identity, becoming its star attraction and raising the quality of life, and property values, for residents.
In Brooklyn, New York, for example, Prospect Park functions as a sort of Main Street, as a different version of the idea of downtown. It is a place where people come together, where they have a common investment that is both psychological and monetary, and where they locate the heart of their neighborhood. And many neighborhoods around the park, such as Park Slope and Prospect Park South, bear the name proudly, as proximity to such a resource contributes substantially to their livability and economic value.
This is not always the case. Indeed many urban neighborhoods bear the names of their local parks like badges of shame. These parks are empty and underused, or spilling over with garbage and illicit activity. They are a liability for their neighborhoods. Of course, many cities and towns simply cannot allocate enough funds to their public spaces to maintain them and manage them at a reasonable level. The public pie has gotten smaller, and police, schools, and social services are considered higher priority areas. This can be partially attributed to several factors that have contributed to the rise of the nonprofit sector overall in this country, among them a shrinking tax base in cities in the northeastern United States, because of depopulation and massive federal cuts in urban programs that have forced cities to spend more money to achieve the same level of service to their citizens.
But money is not the only factor, for there are plenty of wealthy cities and towns that have empty main streets, barren parks, or parks that are simply a loose connection of ballfields and play areas. These spaces, instead of bringing people together, actually alienate them from one another. For those communities, parks are at best playgrounds, and at worst sad, humiliating places.
When people say that their neighborhood lacks a sense of community, this is what they mean. They feel that there is no way for them to participate in their public realm, whether as users, as volunteers, or as financial partners. Malls go up in the suburbs and a downtown deteriorates. A violent incident virtually eliminates use of a park. There may be hundreds of interested, caring individuals in the neighborhood who would like to volunteer, or contribute, or simply use that park or downtown in numbers, but they are not organized, and as a result nothing happens. As an incoming parks director in Indianapolis in the early 1990s, Leon Younger discovered this phenomenon in regard to that city's inefficient, underused park system. People wanted to help. I believe that people aspire to serve, said Younger. However, we needed to create the mechanisms to allow them to invest in the park system.
In Indianapolis, those mechanisms took the form of community partnerships. In one case, the parks department gave maintenance responsibility for smaller parks to churches in the neighborhood, paying them a small fee to do it. This allowed Younger's park workers to concentrate on rebuilding the city's greenways and maintaining its flagship parks.
In New York City in the early 1970s, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers was running a summer youth program as part of the Parks Council volunteer association, a parks nonprofit advocacy group. Thinking about and working in Central Park caused her to notice this same phenomenon a lack of mechanisms that allowed people to invest in the park. She wrote an article entitled 33 Ways Your Time and Money Can Help Save Central Park, which she described as an L.L. Bean catalogue of opportunities. The next week, $25,000 in $5, $25, and $50 contributions, flooded the Parks Council offices. These checks, said Rogers, were accompanied by wonderful memories. That's when I decided I had to stay and stick with the vision.
Rogers eventually became the Central Park Administrator, a city position that was created specifically for her, as well as the president of the Central Park Conservancy, an organization she launched that now has raised over $110 million to restore the park and employs 216 in staff, including 172 positions in horticulture, maintenance, and programming. But New Yorkers don't judge the effectiveness of the conservancy by its funding and staff levels. They vote with their feet, visiting Central Park more than 16 million times every year.
