Pushing Boundaries: Community Development in Parks

by Corinne Ambor and Andrew Giles

Have you noticed that residents expect to be involved in how decisions are made in their communities? The answer is so obvious you may wonder why we ask, but this important point does compete with other priorities in government settings. For municipal employees, involving the community in decision-making means more demands, the specter of volunteer involvement and less time to do their “real work”.
Community involvement in local parks departments may include community litter cleanups, planting efforts, partnerships to achieve various goals, community-initiated committees to address local issues, more thorough public consultation and meetings. It creates additional expectations, new public (and political) pressures and long days. If there is a lack of support or understanding from decision makers of these enhanced expectations and pressures, the result can be employee stress or outright resistance to community involvement.

Let’s step back for a second and look at the bigger picture. The term loosely used to describe the encouragement of community involvement, in all aspects of our society, is “community development”.

While some may view community development as a source of volunteer labour or excessive evening meetings, there is more to it. The “Community Development Continuum”, in the sidebar, illustrates the spectrum of possible community development activities. While most of the activity supported by your department may reside on the top side of the continuum, you can see that there is more potential for community involvement in parks than volunteer planting and cleanup efforts.

Local governments are under pressure to collaborate and share decision-making powers formerly the domain of government alone.

While it is true this has something to do with cutbacks in the face of increasing service demands, there are other factors at play. Residents are better educated than ever before and have more leisure time. They are ecologically aware and concerned about the long-term sustainability of many aspects of our society. In a survey conducted by Viewpoints Research for GVRD Parks in 1998, 84% agreed that residents should have more say how parks are managed. Government is no longer seen as the sole guardian of citizens interests.

As a result, some parks departments, under pressure to cut costs and involve the community, now run volunteer partnership programs.

A closer look reveals that some volunteer programs do not really involve people in decision making in their parks at all, and the long-term benefit they bring to the community and the parks department is open to discussion.

Other models of community development in parks involve community members in decision making within bureaucratic government systems. The result can be low community participation or high frustration on both sides, due to the amount of time involved.

It is possible to link these pieces of meaningful community engagement and on-the-ground assistance in parks. We can challenge ourselves, as municipal parks departments, to forward our communities towards achievable, tangible, mutual goals that benefit both the community and the government.

Let’s take a local success story - Alderwood Park in Surrey (see sidebar). It worked because all the ingredients were there - a clear purpose, community involvement in decision-making, broad community representation and hands-on tasks that affirm for participating residents that their efforts make a difference. There is a robustness to this initiative that is worth noting: people are cleaning up the park and emptying garbage cans as a part of their commitment to “taking back” Alderwood Park, rather than the motivation of saving costs for the Parks Department.

The fresh, relatively non-bureaucratic approach from the City of Surrey aided the success in Alderwood Park. The focus was on building relationships rather than on providing service. New relationships brought new solutions and enhanced the ability of the community to act on them, rather than waiting for the government to provide them.

Despite the success of Alderwood Park and others - there are sure to be examples in your own community - experience tells us that broader community participation can bump up against the traditional way of managing and making decisions in Parks Departments. Bureaucrats can be loath to share decision-making, especially if the implications are not well understood or supported at the political level.
There is pressure for staff to shift roles at least part of the time from service providers to service coordinators or facilitators. The traditional skills of administration, analysis and allocation are still important, but augmenting them with communication, education and facilitation skills - not to mention flexibility - can prepare them for effectively managing greater community expectations.
The bottom line is that if we are truly committed to the long-term sustainability of our park resources, we should be actively engaging the broad aspects of community development in our everyday management of parks. Don’t stop at volunteer cleanups! Like the Alderwood Park example, the relationships built with this approach empower, educate, involve people in their own community and enable them to solve their own issues.

This naturally fosters sustainability, because people will always care about where they live.

Volunteers, partners, and community members can’t and probably don’t want to replace the basic role of parks operations and planning. However, with their involvement, parks departments can enhance their services and ensure the long-term viability of some of the most significant and visible assets governments provide - protected, open, clean and safe parks.

The authors...
Corinne Ambor, District of West Vancouver, Parks and Community Services Division. Corinne is park planner with the District of West Vancouver Parks Department with a background in community development and partnerships. Email: cambor@westvancouver.net Andrew Giles, City of Surrey, Parks, Recreation and Culture Department.

Andrew is a Park Partnership Coordinator with the Parks Operations Section. He works to support community initiatives in parks and the Partners in Parks volunteer programs in Surrey.

Email: adgiles@city’surrey.bc.ca
Corinne and Andrew
acknowledge the input of many colleagues in the creation of this article, and thank them for their expertise, feedback and support.



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