IT'S MY PARK! DAY IN SARA D. ROOSEVELT PARK
On Saturday, October 25th, 2008, Hester Street Collaborative, the Immigrants & Parks Collaborative, and the Sara D Roosevelt Park Coalition hosted It’s My Park! Day in SDR Park. The event was a successful culmination of recent efforts to revitalize the park by involving community in park maintenance, programming, and physical improvements. It’s My Park! Day, a citywide effort to care for and celebrate New York City’s parks, is coordinated bi-annually by Partnerships for Parks. Over 200 community members of all background and volunteers from the Coalition and other community groups gathered at several locations in the park to paint playground equipment, care for street trees, plant bulbs, do general cleanup, and offer their thoughts and suggestions for the park through interactive community mapping activities.
“SDR needs big community activities like this so that people know this is one big park, not seven small parks” said a local resident who stopped to write suggestions for the future of the park on an interactive community visioning map. “More trees and flowers, please! Less concrete!” offered another.
A joint program of HSC and Partnerships for parks called the People Make Parks Initiative was also launched at the SDR It’s My Park! Day. This groundbreaking new project is a citywide effort to get communities involved in park designs by giving them the tools and resources they need to develop a vision for their parks and share them with the Department of Parks & Recreation. The launch of the People Make Parks Initiative at It’s My Park! Day is just the beginning of an exciting series of city-wide events and participatory design processes that HSC plans to facilitate throughout New York in the coming 2 years. |
