Neighborhood Parks Council
San Francisco, CA
Key Findings:
- Collecting data from park users on an ongoing basis is invaluable to park maintenance
- Reporting raised brown lawn awareness
- A web-based reporting system is very effective in helping identity trouble areas
Organization description:
Neighborhood Parks Council (NPC) advocates for a superior, equitable and sustainable park and recreation system. NPC provides leadership and support to park users through community-driven stewardship, education, planning and research. Since 1996, NPC has established itself as San Francisco's premier park advocacy authority, representing more than 100 park groups, over 50 strategic partner organizations, and 4,000+ park volunteers.
Program Description:
ParkScan, the Council's innovative reporting program, lets park users report problems. Those reports go directly to the responsible city parks maintenance staff and are posted immediately on http://www.parkscan.org for public viewing. The Web site also features quarterly reports, showing the most troublesome parks and what progress the parks department has made since last quarter. Since its inception in 2002, ParkScan has made significant strides in making condition reporting accessible to the public. Users find http://www.parkscan.org to be easy-to-use and well-designed. In 2009, ParkScan users made 1,225 observations about 141 parks.ParkScan is an invaluable tool in another important project: the Playground Report Card.
Some 17 percent of issues reported via ParkScan in 2009 were about playgrounds. So starting February 1, 2010, NPC solicited hundreds of ParkScan volunteers to examine their neighborhood playgrounds for maintenance issues. Out of 125 playgrounds, 16 received a D or F grade; many have rotting or splintered wood, dangerous play equipment, graffiti, and no posted rules. The Council is now pushing the Recreation and Parks Department to make the needed improvements, particularly at the most dilapidated sites.
Program goals/issues addressed:
ParkScan's goal is clean, safe, beautiful and fun parks for all San Francisco residents.
Timeframe (planning/execution):
ParkScan has been active since 2002. Most problems are resolved within days, though not usually reported as such by the Recreation and Park staff. Graffiti is removed within 48 hours.
Annual program budget/Funding sources/partnerships and type of support provided:
ParkScan's local budget is $125,000 per year supported by a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation of New York with supplemental funding from the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, and the City and County of San Francisco. The program is a partnership with 311 and the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department.
Results achieved/impact (include as much quantitative data as possible):
Before 2002, San Francisco park users had no reliable way to report problems to parks staff. Both telephone calls to the city and letters to the department were generally ignored. Decreasing staff levels have meant that not all parks are maintained on a daily or even weekly basis. By collecting data on an ongoing basis from hundreds of park users, the NPC has both been able to directly help park staff to address problems that they are not necessarily aware of and to pressure the parks department to improve staffing, management and allocation of existing staff resources.Modifications to the ParkScan system in 2005 and 2010 have resulted in an easy-to-use, Web-based reporting system that makes it possible for anyone with Web access to report problems. Using the more accessible system has helped push reporting of park problems to a new level. More importantly, it has been achieving the kind of results that residents only dreamed of a few years ago.
