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SUCCESS STORIES

Bronx Coalition for Parks and Green Spaces: Building Links Borough-Wide

For the past six years, groups working in Bronx parks have met every February at the Bronx Parks Speak-Up. The day-long session was begun by the Bronx Council for Environ-mental Quality as a forum for creating a calendar of events in Bronx parks. Over the years the event evolved into a "report card" for parks, with speeches by the Borough Commissioner and the Parks Commissioner and discussions about surfacing issues. The Speak-Up led to a greater focus in the borough on the Bronx River, which is now a focal point of community and government involvement. Breakout discussions allowed groups to network and share ideas.

While the Speak-Ups worked well as a forum for exchanging ideas and sharing calendar information, the cooperation among groups didn't extend into the rest of the year. Groups began to feel frustrated that they gathered together each year to talk about the challenges they were facing in their parks, and they weren't working together to come up with solutions.

Partnerships for Parks Bronx Outreach coordinators knew that last year their colleagues in Brooklyn had worked with the Prospect Park Alliance and other Brooklyn groups to help form a coalition called the Brooklyn Parks Advocates. At planning sessions for this year's Speak-Up, the Outreach Coordinators suggested that Bronx groups might want to consider doing the same thing. 2001 is an election year in New York City, and because of term limits more than two-thirds of the races-including all four city-wide offices-have no incumbents. This fact, coupled with the groups' own frustrations, created a strong impetus for forming a coalition. Partnerships' Bronx Outreach Coordinators and the Speak-Up's planning committee used their contacts in the community and the Partnerships database to reach out to a much broader array of community groups and invite them to the Speak-Up.

The February 2001 Speak-Up was the best-attended in the event's history, with more than 200 people from more than 50 organizations participating. The event was divided into sessions to discuss three issues: Should there be a Bronx coalition?; surfacing issues/creating a Bronx-wide agenda; and techniques for approaching candidates and elected officials.

The coalition that grew out of the latest Speak-Up held its first meeting in March 2001 and has been meeting monthly ever since. Today the coalition comprises more than 30 organizations, including housing associations, little leagues, civic associations, and parks and garden groups. From the results of the discussions at the Speak-Up, the Bronx Coalition for Parks and Green Spaces adopted a seven-point platform asking candidates to increase the Parks budget; hire more, especially skilled, personnel; preserve community gardens; and increase the opportunities for recreation in parks.

Since it formed, the Coalition has had two major goals: first, to reach out to community organizations in the Bronx and ask them to join the coalition; and second, to make candidates aware that improving the borough's parks and green spaces is an important issue to a large number of voters. The Coalition has endorsed Parks 2001, a citywide campaign to restore public funding for parks. It has succeeded in getting a number of City Council candidates to endorse its platform, and is planning a post-Primary rally in late September. To further its goal of bringing a diverse group of organizations together, the Coalition has mapped out which districts have groups in the coalition, and targeted those districts with less representation. Through outreach the Coalition has tried to raise the community's expectations about how parks should be, thereby encouraging people to get involved with the coalition.