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The Parks & People Network: Taking ACTION to Save Our Parks and CommunitiesPark revitalization needs you. Here are four simple steps to take action:
Step One: Join the Parks NetworkMillions of Americans are fighting to reclaim urban parks everywhere. Across the Washington region, the following parks have been actively helped by groups in the Potomac Parks Network. They are at all stages of revitalization. To get involved or add your park to the list, contact Parks & People.
Step Two: Make Your Park Come AliveMulticultural Park Organizing and Programming: 20 Successful Strategies for Reversing Abandonment Here are 20 techniques that have worked for Washington Parks & People at Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park: 1. Took time to get to know and learn from the long-time users of the Park, and asked diverse leaders among them to guide the Friends and ensure that our diversity is institutional as well as programmatic (this is not easy; the most dedicated "Park people" often have little interest in management, meetings, memos, or money but understand the meaning of the Park better than anyone). 2. Adapted traditional Native American, African American, Latin American, and pagan European rituals into seasonal celebrations that honor different cultural heritages and our common bonds in the Earth. 3. Helped build regular diverse uses of the Park that link the landscape into people's daily lives and different traditions: Latino and Caribbean soccer games (ball-playing had been illegal), African American drumming circle, Mexican and Indochinese dance practice, morning Tai Chi sessions, arts programs, daycare and other children's play programs, and multicultural senior outings. 4. Nurtured broad religious support and involvement to inspire people to help the Park, including Baptist, Buddhist, Catholic, Eritrean, Evangelical, Jewish, Lutheran, Quaker, and Unitarian spiritual ceremonies and service programs. 5. Produced free "pageantry" to make the Park come alive as Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (who designed our Concert Grove) intended, including over 100 concerts honoring young people and "Worlds Coming Together at the Park" cross-cultural theater (inspired by the Living Stage and Cornerstone Theater Companies); dance performances led by the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in which the audience became the performers and the entire park became the stage; ceremonies honoring multicultural heroes in the neighborhood; poetry from many cultures; African American Civil War reenactments; Native American sunrise services; Lights of Hope fountain lighting; school graduations; weddings and memorial services; model boat regattas; life-size chess tournaments; and Joan of Arc's 580th birthday, with the ghost of the Saint arriving in armor on horseback, together with a young girl portraying a modern-day Joan of Arc -- Linda Brown, the seven-year-old whose courage led to the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation decision. 6. Drew a simple map of Park user groups and resources, and surrounding community assets that could contribute to park revitalization (having started by thinking we had very little to work with, we have been continually amazed at how much our communities have to offer). 7. Partnered with hundreds of arts, culture, youth, social service, and community institutions, to help them use the Park as an extension of their facilities, to restore six smaller nearby neighborhood parks and connecting streetscapes, and to help restore and reunite the neighborhoods around the park. 8. Encouraged local community development corporations, property owners, and businesses to use the park as a symbol of economic and residential revitalization of the entire area, as a spark for new investment, and as a focal point for job training and creation. 9. Led regional and national group site visits of the Park to press funders for new grantmaking to integrate park revitalization and programming into nearly every area of urban philanthropic concern. 10. Advanced a national model of community policing in the park, transforming a long-standing police-community rift into a prevention-oriented partnership with the U.S. Park Police. 11. Transformed a once-violent place into what Ghandi might have called "a zone of peace," celebrating life in the Park by planting 130 trees in memory of people in the Park and community and by honoring the Park's mascot and symbol of respect for all life -- the earthworm. 12. Created our motto (with the poet's permission) from Maya Angelou's poem: "A Rock, A River, A Tree, A Park for All People." When our late Co-Chair Josephine Butler heard the Inaugural Poem about the many peoples of America, the image she kept thinking about was the Park set in the most diverse part of the Capital: the Rock, the 500 million-year-old cliff at the center of the Park; the River, both the artificial Cascade of Fountains and the long-buried Slash's Run Creek under the hilltop; and the Tree, all those memorial trees planted as symbols of life throughout the Park. 13. Led tours, story-telling, and other interpretive programs emphasizing the interwoven Native American, Middle Eastern, Latin American, Asian, as well as European and U.S., roots of the historic landscape, as well as the direct contributions by African American and immigrant workers to the construction and craftsmanship of the Park. 14. Developed pilot school programs integrating the park into many parts of the curricula for pre-K through college, from Environmental Studies to Neighborhood History, from Literature to Government Studies, from Filmmaking to Architecture, from Dance to Preservation Technology. 15. Brought new users -- many initially quite nervous -- into the Park for volunteer gardening and service programs, jogging, picnics, singles events, and dog walking groups (which became "Dogs in the Hood" for our parade to the Capitol on the 25th Anniversary of Earth Day). 16. Physically reconnected the Park to wider concentric circles of community, including downtown and the broader region, with 10K runs, new tour bus routes, marches, links to museum tours, programmatic partnerships with other parks, innercity youth park tours, and promotion of non-automotive greenway and transit connections across the regional park system. 17. Conducted heritage tours, oral history programs, senior center presentations, and other outreach to reconnect the park's "alumni" (former users) and its past with its present life. 18. Made regular use of free media coverage to counteract decades of bad news with each new positive development. 19. Campaigned to restore the park in maps and guidebooks that had either ignored or denigrated it for decades, marketing the Park as a unique cultural as well as natural landscape, and as America's first national park for the performing arts. 20. Advertised the Park's renaissance as "Washington's most international park" with large color pictures in magazine articles, newspaper pullout sections, the subway system (coming soon), and on the cover of the phone book; electronic footage in television and radio documentaries, music videos, and two feature films; and outreach to embassies, international tourists, and community leaders from other cultures seeking to learn from the Meridian Hill revitalization model. Step 3: Involve the Whole Community in the ParkInvolving the Whole Community in the Park: Checklists for Lateral Local Leveraging The African proverb says that it takes a whole village to raise a single child. In communities across America, it takes a village green. Unless innercity neighborhoods offer compelling public places for the human and natural worlds to come together in peace, "community" becomes a merely theoretical idea. The urban parks movement is rebuilding the soul of our cities by reclaiming the vital public places needed for community to exist. Park revitalization demands broad outreach to establish the parks as centers of city life and as pivotal institutions in the urban renaissance. For lasting impact, our programs, partners, and philanthropy inside the parks must meet the needs of the surrounding communities. In so doing, we will build investment in the Park Enterprise by a broad range of other government agencies, community institutions, funders, businesses, and residents. This is Lateral Local Leveraging. PARK PARTNER CHECKLISTS Beyond existing park agencies, organizations, and funders, the following three checklists identify ten city departments, ten partner organizations and ten philanthropic program areas to extend and maximize the impact of park revitalization. Park leaders interested in boosting their Lateral Local Leveraging can use these lists to evaluate existing outreach and funding programs and identify new possibilities. A. Ten City Agencies for Park Programs
B. Ten Kinds of Non-Profits for Park Planning and Programs
C. Ten Major Philanthropic Program Areas for Parks
Step 4: Forge a Lasting Public/Private PartnershipThe Total Park Enterprise: 20 Actions to Maximize Public/Private Park Partnerships The two most important steps are listed first and last: asking for help, and thanking the people who gave it. Everything else is secondary. 1. Ask for community help, and mean it. The more you ask and the more different ways you find to ask, the more you will discover hidden assets and talent. 2. Cultivate park/community leaders. Listen and learn from their stories about the past, their concerns about the present, and their ideas for the future. Train people in asset-based park revitalization. 3. Share power. As Brian O'Neill, the inspiring superintendent of Golden Gate National Park, has demonstrated, the more power you share with qualified citizen groups, the more power the parks will have, because you and your empowered partners will be able to get so much more done. Without giving up your statutory authority over the resource, you can share a great deal of power creatively and effectively. 4. Lead Lateral Local Leveraging to advance the parks as the centers of city life and platforms for renewal and reinvestment. This means maximizing programs that bring cultural institutions and community-based organizations of all kinds together in the parks with such other city agencies as education, housing, community development, human services, arts and cultural offices, tourism, public health, transit, public works, planning, and police. 5. Build high-profile, lasting constituencies for parks through city-wide park promotion and revitalization campaigns that link the renaissance of the parks to the renaissance of the city itself. Advertisements can be paid for entirely through private donations, in-kind graphic and copy labor, and free advertising space in the mass transit system and on the airwaves. 6. Shine a spotlight on local and national mentors, innovators, and model park revitalization efforts to inspire community leaders about the possibilities. 7. Help launch and build a permanent city-wide network of park support groups. 8. Include leading park partners in regular site management, planning, and training meetings with agency chiefs and line staff. Be as open as possible in sharing public information. In addition to meetings, a listserve may be an efficient way to boost regular communication with partners. 9. Set up a Park Asset and Resource Center (PARC), a city-wide information exchange system and clearinghouse to support community-based park revitalization with a tool bank, an in-kind donor bank, a pro bono professional bank (ranging from designers and architects to accountants and attorneys), fund-raising counsel, and promotional resources. (In Washington, this is done at the Josephine Butler Parks Center.) 10. Make government resources directly available to deserving community-based park groups. Look for every opportunity for micro or major block grants, state and federal grant application assistance, audit and financial training and support, surplus government equipment, landscape materials, summer youth laborers, and volunteers from the National Civilian Community Corps and AmeriCorps. 11. Designate in-park office space and signage for partners wherever possible. 12. Provide park philanthropy briefings on funding opportunities to foundations, corporations, charities, and individual major donors, segmented by issue or category of giving. 13. Encourage formation of voluntary or formal Business Improvement Districts (BID's) to improve the parks and surrounding communities through special annual assessments. 14. Support heritage and eco-tourism promotional efforts around the parks. 15. Launch a park workplace giving program among city employees and major businesses. 16. Maximize ripple economic development impacts in depressed areas by connecting the parks to nearby job training programs, housing programs, community development corporations, and community service organizations. 17. Invite involvement of small businesses and neighborhood groups in the development of earned income for innercity parks through interpretive products and services, licensing, special event fees, benefit performances, and concessions. Enlist business and community leaders in developing ways to document the positive economic impacts of the parks on the city. 18. Promote city-wide park programming links to encourage neighborhood involvement in the parks. See cross-cultural programming ideas and other previous responses. 19. Establish agreements for long-term private endowment and capital fund-raising by park support groups to boost the parks as lasting institutions. Why shouldn't parks benefit as institutions from the same planned giving, bequests, and endowed gifts that ensure lasting stewardship of hospitals, arts, and educational institutions? Einstein was right when he suggested that the power of compounding interest might be the greatest force in the universe: $1.00 invested in the stock market at the beginning of the century, returning the stock market's historic average return of 11%, would be worth $50,000 today! So don't overlook the power of those pennies and nickels thrown into park fountains. 20. Find regular opportunities to recognize, thank, and celebrate volunteer leaders, partner organizations, in-kind donors, and funders. Provide partners with graphic symbols of their contribution that they can display (T-shirts, arm patches, car and window decals, certificates, photos of award ceremonies, etc.). Evaluate agency officials on the basis of their partnership support. Honor creative, effective partnering leaders within your agency and enlist them in training others. |