At Partnerships for Parks, we believe that parks are essential to the life of the city, and that community involvement is essential to the life of a park. We have seen that the parks that thrive, rather than simply survive, are those that have active communities caring and fighting for them.

Our mission is to spur more community support for and involvement in New York City's parks. We work to strengthen, support and start neighborhood park groups; link them together so that they can learn from each other and be stronger collectively; and promote parks in general so that people will join in efforts to restore and preserve them.

We began in 1995 for two reasons. First, we were responding to decades of cuts in funding for New York City's parks. We believed that there was a large, untapped parks constituency that could be identified and encouraged to speak up to secure adequate public support. Second, the striking results of citizen-led efforts to transform parks, involving groups ranging from a tiny block association in Hell's Kitchen to the Central Park Conservancy, convinced us that local constituencies needed to be formed and strengthened for every park.