City parks are central to healthy, safe, vibrant, and sustainable communities. The diverse demands and limited resources for urban park systems require city leaders work more effectively across sectors, leveraging civic assets as well as funding and expertise from the public, nonprofit and private realms.
In response to feedback from City Parks Alliance members and others in the park and recreation field, City Parks Alliance has developed city workshops to:
- Build skills for effective public-nonprofit park partnerships – developing the collaborative governance capacity of park and recreation leaders.
- Seed replication of innovation by developing a peer network between cities to help them learn from other’s success.
- Support new collaborative partnerships by hosting workshops locally with cross-sector participation.
Workshops are led by professional facilitators and draw on the experience of leaders around the country through a unique curriculum that includes interactive, peer-to-peer learning where city leadership teams can explore new approaches to the challenge at hand and jump-start new collaborations. Workshops are customized to meet the needs of local communities and can be offered in single and multi-day formats. Workshops have been held in Detroit, Birmingham, Flint, Los Angeles, Travis City, San Jose, with additional workshops coming up in Kansas City and Boston.
City Parks Alliance will be offering four city workshops in cities with high rates of low-income communities over the next two years. These city workshops are made possible with support from The JPB Foundation.
We are seeking proposals from interested cities. Cities selected will receive a mini-grant upon completion of an implementation strategy.
Join us for a free webinar on Wednesday, November 14 to learn more about this opportunity. The webinar will provide an overview of the program, local matching fund requirements, and information about the RFP process.
Speaker: Caryn Ernst, Strategic Initiatives Director, City Parks Alliance
City Parks Alliance is unveiling a dual-themed webinar series in 2018, focused on two of our network’s most requested topics: funding and equity. This year, webinars will cover how to creatively fund local urban parks, and ensure that attendees get an inside look at how to apply an equity lens to all areas of their work. Half of the six upcoming webinars will focus on sustainable investing in urban parks, equipping park and recreation practitioners with tools to fund development, stewardship, and park programming. The other half of our 2018 webinars will explore what equitable policies and practices look like for urban park practitioners, delivering practical methods for embracing equity and inclusion within and beyond park organizations.
The 2018 equity webinar series is sponsored by Landscape Structures.
