Heeley People's Park: five tips for sustaining parks

In the last blog for Rethinking Parks I wrote about the challenges of changing public perception of the value of and funding mechanisms for our parks and open spaces. That is to say that parks are not free but their value is way beyond the cost of maintenance.

In Sheffield, the Heeley People’s Park team have been exploring and developing a subscription society, a community giving project that hopes to engage with and to involve our local community in the life and the future of our park. Without that involvement and support, the future maintenance and development of this (and many other) green spaces is not certain.

So at the end of the Rethinking Parks programme, as winter is here and Dave our Parky is finally wearing a jumper, where have we got to? And most importantly – has it worked?

Well, yes it has – so far! Early subscriptions over the first six months, matched with earned income and donations from local businesses have tracked our projections (guesses) pretty closely, though we’re revising our expectations down as we move forward.

What that means is that we raised enough money to effect some well needed large scale repairs to our slide and we will have a Big Boulder Music Festival in 2016. Neither one of these would have happened without those pioneer subscribers and that level of community support.

We were right to believe in the project and the approach. A subscription model is a viable option to deliver long term support and engagement and a portion of the income required to deliver independent, high quality maintenance.

With hindsight such a radical departure from what folks are used to was bound to take time to sink in and the message to embed - we should have been more cautious with our projections.

So what are our top five tips for anybody considering this approach?

1. Don’t enter into this lightly or underestimate the work to engage and hold on to your subscribers – it is an investment for the long term, probably the income generated is not and should not be the primary reason for doing it.

2. No business should count on one source of income alone anyway, but this could be a potentially important part of the revenue stream. The ideal mix will include some or all of the following:

a ring-fenced existing revenue budget, planned for and medium term, probably offering a reduction on the original budget and probably from the Local Authority.

Income from buildings and assets – possibly in the space, maybe not – rental or other generated income plus a valuable part of the balance sheet. Link the leases or tenure to that of the greenspace.

Income from Concessions and tenants in the park – cafe, pitch hire, ice cream van, fishing rights, green gym or sports instruction businesses.

Funded or ticketed events, bars, other generated income.

Sale of crops and produce - depends on type of park / space.

Disposal and capital receipts. Where land or buildings or developments are sold from the public asset base that are linked to an open space there is a really big and important imperative to link the receipt to the impact not wash it away. Such agreements need to be fought for and have no legislation to support them but the principle that developments and business activities benefit from proximity to beautiful landscape should be ingrained.

Dowrys, endowment and trusts.

Donations and sponsorship.

3. Start developing your brand, identity, idea and market well before you need the income. Give yourself time and capacity to grow awareness, trust and profile within your community

4. Keep your messages and marketing clear, simple and powerful and make your communication personal not corporate. Word of mouth still works best of all.

5. Don’t look for clever, bespoke or expensive solutions to create web and giving resources. There are easily available, secure, well tried and tested tools. Just Giving is seen as a trusted platform, make use of that as people are wary of internet scams, internet giving, security of personal data, hackers etc.

To do all this of course, you need to be energetic, flexible and able to make decisions quickly, you will need to take risks and you will need to take time to persuade people and allow them on the journey, mostly, like us you will need to care deeply about the future of our Parks and Open Spaces – what would our society be like without them? I, for one, do not want to find out!

Rethinking Parks was a £1 million Big Lottery Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund and Nesta programme designed to find, support and test new business models to sustain the UK's public parks.

Author

Andy Jackson

Andy leads on strategy and development for Heeley Development Trust, a small community development charity in inner-city Sheffield.