Introduction

Public-private partnerships for parks are proliferating across the country—and generating much excitement and interest. One reason is that they work. Parks partnerships are successfully combining the assets of the public and private sectors in novel ways to create new and refurbished parks, greenways, trails, and other community assets in our cities—often in the face of municipal budget constraints.

Another reason for the increased interest in parks partnerships is that parks themselves are becoming more important elements of urban revitalization initiatives under way nationwide. After nearly three decades of steady decline, changing public attitudes are encouraging many cities to support more investments in public infrastructure, including parks. Instead of being challenged to upgrade and maintain parks in the face of continuing neighborhood decline, park managers now are encouraged to use parks as a way to support positive changes in neighborhoods. And increasingly, parks agencies are not expected to do this alone. In many cities and urban neighborhoods, they can count on the support of other organized constituencies, most often from the expanding community-based nonprofit sector.

Importantly, park partnerships are occurring in an overall environment of growing public-private partnerships in other activities, too—especially community development. A new "technology" of partnerships is thus evolving, offering valuable lessons that can be applied across a variety of arenas.

The observations in this report are derived from early findings from a four-year evaluation of the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Urban Parks Initiative commissioned from the Urban Institute in 1996. The initiative, which was launched in 1994, seeks to create new parks and renovate existing parks in 11 U.S. cities. Stronger and more effective partnerships between public parks agencies and local nonprofits are among the strategies the Fund is supporting as part of this effort. The Fund hopes to demonstrate that parks agencies can build, renovate, maintain, and program parks more effectively in partnerships with nonprofit organizations than they can acting alone. The projects reveal important topics to be considered when planning, creating, and entering into new parks partnerships or assessing existing ones.

Based on our early field investigations in the 11 cities participating in the initiative, we developed the following framework to help us examine the contribution of parks partnerships to park improvement and creation projects. Many individuals from both the public and private sectors who are participating in the initiative found the framework helpful and have begun to use it to examine their own partnerships; we present it here in hopes that others will find it useful as well. Our framework examines four key considerations in parks partnerships:

• Structure. Much like most business partnerships, public-private partnerships for parks include both general partners and limited partners, each with its own set of responsibilities, strengths, and weaknesses. In the Urban Parks Initiative, the general partners are typically parks agencies and nonprofit organizations that support parks. The limited partners are the various constituencies that use or support parks—including recreation associations, environmental groups, youth organizations, and community development agencies.

• Control. In business partnerships, the general partners usually make all of the major decisions, without consulting with the limited partners. In parks partnerships, decisionmaking responsibility is shared more broadly: limited partners often are given a voice in decisionmaking in return for their support.

• Assets and Liabilities. Partners bring both assets and liabilities to the partnership. In good partnerships, the assets of one partner offset the liabilities of another. In public-private partnerships for parks, we found it helpful to view assets and liabilities in terms of the partners' financial resources, organizational capacity, public image, and constituency characteristics.

• Risks. The parks partnerships encountered a variety of risks, but all have developed a set of strategies for mitigating them.

In addition to the four-part framework, this paper also reviews common challenges to successful parks partnerships. These include insufficient capacity among partners to carry out their promises, inadequate commitment to collaboration, the pursuit of flawed strategies, insufficient returns, and failure to communicate effectively. Most successful partnerships have devised ways to meet and overcome these challenges.

A fuller evaluation of the Urban Parks Initiative will be published in 2000 and will include specific detail about each of the fund-supported projects. Another document—analyzing community involvement in parks development-will be produced in 1999, and a manual on conducting research about park users will be produced in 2000.

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