On Saturday, October 25th, 2008, the Immigrants & Parks Collaborative and the Sara D Roosevelt Park (SDR) 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.” “The park is very activity oriented: it would be nice to have more space to just chill out,” said one local resident. “More trees and flowers, please! Less concrete!” offered another.

Community members at the event were not only improving and critiquing SDR Park last Saturday: they also had the opportunity to view a large-scale exhibition on the new People Make Parks Initiative, which was launched at SDR on It’s My Park! Day. This groundbreaking new initiative is a joint program of Hester Street Collaborative and Partnerships for Parks, and will expand the role of communities in park design by giving them the tools and resources they need to develop a vision for their local parks and share them with the Department of Parks & Recreation. The exhibition included People Make Parks’ major components, future plans, proposed test sites, and anticipated outcomes for under-resourced neighborhoods across the city. The exhibition also reported back to the community on plans that they have played a role in shaping for local parks, including the visioning processes for SDR Park and the Allen & Pike Street Malls.

SDR Park’s Hester Street Playground has served as a test site for participatory park design strategies and will close in January 2009 to be rebuilt according to a plan responsive to community input. SDR and the successful platform of It’s My Park! Day was therefore an ideal setting for the launch of People Make Parks. As Anne Frederick, executive director of Hester Street Collaborative and co-chair of the SDR Coalition, comments, “It’s My Park! Day provides a platform for residents, youth, and all kinds of stakeholders to have a hand and a voice in transforming their park spaces; our People Make Parks initiative will take the tools and resources that we have developed for community involvement in park improvements in the Lower East Side and Chinatown and make them accessible to neighborhoods throughout NYC.” The launch of the People Make Parks Initiative is just the beginning of an exciting series of city-wide events and participatory design processes that the Collaborative plans on being extremely active in.