Since the Park Visioning Program’s creation in 2008, Park Pride’s professional landscape architect, the Director of Park Visioning, has worked with Friends of the Park groups in the City of Atlanta to imagine and design their neighborhood parks.
“The Park Visioning process has helped to engage communities as they develop a collective vision for their neighborhood,” stated Alvin Dodson, Deputy Commissioner of the City of Atlanta Department of Parks and Recreation. “We look forward to our continued partnership with Park Pride.”
Park Visioning is a keystone program of Park Pride. Its process embodies the organization’s value of a bottom-up approach, recognizing the residents of the neighborhoods we work with as experts of their own community and giving their needs and wishes a voice. The program is inclusive of all individuals in a community—from the retired teacher, to the pick-up soccer player, to the stay-at-home parent and the avid dog walker. All have different ideas and hopes for what their park could become, and the Park Visioning process calls for several public meetings organized specifically to encourage and collect feedback from the community at large.
In 2016, Park Pride welcomed Andrew White as the new Director of Park Visioning and Teri Nye as the Park Visioning Coordinator. The team quickly dove into their work, completing a park visioning effort for the future Westside park, Boone Park West, set to break ground in 2017, as well as a linear park concept known as the Memorial Drive Greenway to the east of Downtown.
The combined background and experience of White and Nye has made, in part, the expansion into DeKalb County feasible, and Park Pride looks forward to expanding the impact of the Park Visioning Program with a total of four “visionings” in 2017 across Atlanta and DeKalb.
“We have had a great working relationship with Park Pride for a number of years,” said Marvin Billups, Interim Director of Recreation, Parks & Cultural Affairs of DeKalb County. “We are delighted to now expand the scope of services Park Pride brings to DeKalb parks to include Park Visioning.”