Why Parks?
NCP works closely with small cities and their underserved communities to create parks where they are most needed, bringing greater health and happiness through play, exercise, and contact with nature, and building environmental and community resilience.
Parks are crucial to our physical and cognitive development and to our overall health and well-being. They offer our bodies and brains active play, exercise, and socialization, as well as the contact with nature that humans are programmed to need. What’s more, they cost-effectively filter stormwater runoff and cool and filter air.
However, 3 out of 4 children in under-resourced neighborhoods can’t walk to a safe park. Teens in low-income communities are half as likely to have access to parks as their peers in more affluent neighborhoods. A recent Trust for Public Land study concluded that parks in under-resourced neighborhoods are half the size and four times more crowded than parks in wealthier neighborhoods.
“Parks are places to play, to commune, to escape into nature, to build mind and muscle. Our need for nature and recreation is part of our DNA and green space should be part of every urban neighborhood.”
New City Parks (NCP) was launched in the fall of 2019 to address park access inequities. Under the leadership of Rose Harvey, former Commissioner of NY State Parks and previously National Director of Urban Programs for the Trust for Public Land, NCP works with communities to realize their visions of safe, appealing, and well-designed parks.
NCP currently has fourteen projects underway in five cities in the Northeast. We have raised significant private funding to provide community outreach and pre-development, engineering, and design services to make these parks ready for transformation. This private investment is now leveraging over $34 million dollars in primarily public capital funding for the construction of our park projects. Four parks have been fully renovated and are being stewarded and programmed in collaboration with our community partners.