After serving the community for over 60 years, the Montopolis neighborhood park and recreation center has gone through an extensive upgrade to better serve the community.
The Montopolis community became a part of Austin in 1951 and has historically been home to African American and Latino populations, underserved, underinvested, and isolated from many basic city services. The recreation center was originally constructed with volunteer help from the Delores Church and opened as a community center in 1963 to serve the surrounding Latino population. The City of Austin purchased the building and five surrounding acres in 1974, adding park amenities later that year. A pool facility was added shortly thereafter in 1979.
Two separate bond cycles, in 2012 and 2018, paved the way for a complete replacement of the recreation center and major pool renovation. In addition to community-supported bond initiatives, the projects leveraged the federal Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership (ORLP) grant and a public-private partnership to replace the neighborhood playground. The park and facilities serve as a sustainable resilience hub for the community, including the joint-use recreation center that also houses Austin Public Health services. As a resilience hub, the park provides a variety of services in one convenient location for the community, including access to water as a relief from heat, a warming and cooling center, an emergency shelter, food pantry, teen and kid centers, recreational activities, clothes closet, nutrition programs, public health services, a commercial kitchen for meal services, and community gathering spaces.
This mobile workshop will tour the new facilities and discuss the community engagement process, funding strategies, and sustainable initiatives that achieved both LEED Gold and SITES certifications.
