Parks, greenways, and other open spaces are essential for public health, climate resilience, and strong, connected communities. Yet 100 million people in the United States—including 28 million kids—don’t have a park within a 10-minute walk of home. As cities become denser, and land for parks becomes increasingly scarce, planners and community leaders must work together to find innovative ways to fund this critical infrastructure. With recent passage of the Biden Administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, now is the time to leverage federal grant funding to support parks and open-space networks.
This presentation shows how historical investments in parks have created direct and long-lasting benefits for 10 major U.S. cities and how infrastructure adaptation projects can be used to fund new parks through federal RAISE grants. Participants learn how to make federal grant proposals more competitive by using publicly available GIS tools and mapping applications to determine where open-space investments may have the most positive and equitable community impacts.
NPC Peer Reviewers assigned this presentation a learning level of Intermediate. For more on learning-level descriptions, visit our General Information Page.
Learning Objectives:
Confidently advocate for expanded investment in parks and open space projects through a “triple-bottom-line” (people, planet, profit) approach.
Identify opportunities for leveraging infrastructure-reuse projects to secure federal grant funding for parks and open space.
Use powerful digital mapping tools to support federal grant applications with relevant geospatial data.
