When cities are faced with budgetary crisis, expenditures on parks, recreation, and open space are usually among the first services to be cut. In the early 1980s, Massachusetts citizens passed Proposition 2 1/2, a tax-cutting measure that precipitated a fiscal crisis for public services. Parks and open space were pitted against other needy issues, such as housing, education, and employment, despite the fact that organizations like BUG and the Southwest Corridor Farm had demonstrated that programs for job training and community development could be successfully integrated with open space projects. Boston cut its Park Department's budget by 50 percent, and the departmental staff, which had once been as high as 700 employees, dropped to fewer than 200 employees by 1986.
In 1984, representatives from community groups, parks and environmental groups, and business associations joined to create the Boston GreenSpace Alliance, a city-wide coalition formed to advocate on behalf of Boston's parks and urban landscape. The Alliance has been extremely successful in publicizing the fate of the Boston park system and in placing open space issues on the political agenda of the city. With a full-time executive director, it has also initiated programs supported by private funds. The Alliance's success is due, in part, to the breadth of constituents represented by its member organizations. Before the formation of the Alliance, the constituency for urban environmental issues was large, but disconnected. One common point of contact was Boston Urban Gardeners, which had long relied upon an extensive network of people in public and private organizations throughout the city to implement their various projects. BUG's network became an important core group for the future alliance.
The Alliance began when, alarmed by the deteriorating parks and urban landscape, environmental leaders began meeting to discuss common goals. The working group met for dinners and breakfasts. Ironically, the diversity of members with varied agendas was also one of the major hurdles that had to be cleared in the beginning. Old suspicions ran deep, as business leaders, community organizers, civil servants, academics, and others found it difficult to agree even on something as simple as a neutral meeting place. Initially, the director of the Boston Globe Foundation called people together and helped mediate the discussions. The meetings were on neutral territory in the Boston Globe offices. With time, the leaders developed personal relationships with each other which developed trust. Working together, the group wrote a mission statement.
The Globe Foundation gave the Boston GreenSpace Alliance an initial seed grant of $8000. Within six months, this was augmented by a $50,000 grant from the Boston Foundation. Funding from the Boston Foundation was part of that foundation's developing agenda: the Poverty Impact Program. The Boston Foundation identified Parks and Open-space Needs as one of the four issues to be addressed, along with Maternal and Infant Health Care, Teenage Pregnancy, and Employment and Training.
Following this major grant, the Alliance incorporated as a non-profit organization and hired an executive director. The newly formed Boston GreenSpace Alliance had a very active role in another inititiative sponsored by the Boston Foundation--the Carol R. Goldberg Seminar--whose topic was "The Future of Boston's Parks and Open Spaces." The seminar created a two year dialogue, running from 1986 to 1988, between the leaders of Boston's public agencies, community groups, and private businesses and foundations. Mark Primack, director of the Alliance recalls, "The thing that [the Carol R. Goldberg Seminar] did was, it established a common language. Everybody in this city who thinks about this stuff thinks with the same language. We don't argue about open space anymore. We argue about issues, but nobody argues about the value of open space anymore. It's pretty amazing." The product of the seminar was a book reporting the proceedings and conclusions called The Greening of Boston: An Action Agenda. The book was designed to be accessible to a wide number of groups throughout the city so that it could be a living document in the greening of Boston.
The Boston GreenSpace Alliance had rapid and early successes. The initial strategies were to increase public awareness and support for the Alliance's political agenda through the newspaper, radio, and television media and to secure political support through direct dialogue with the mayor's office. In March 1986, leaders from the Alliance met with the mayor to emphasize the breadth of their support across multiple socio-economic groups. That summer, the Boston Globe published a series of editorials probing the conditions of Boston's parks and its effects on the city.
These efforts persuaded the mayor to adopt a pro-parks stance in his reelection platform. The mayor reenforced this position by appointing an aggressive new Parks Commissioner and increasing the operating and capital improvements budgets for the Park Department. In June 1987 the operating budget was nearly doubled; capital improvements over the next three years totaled nearly 100 million dollars.
The Boston GreenSpace Alliance was created to fulfill specific political goals regarding a pressing issue in Boston: the state of the municipal parks and green spaces. Within three years those goals had been effectively addressed and to a large extent realized. The Alliance has continued to function, however, and has broadened its objectives from advocacy to sponsorship of its own programs. As public funds dried up for one worthwhile programs--the Park Partners, the Alliance has initiated a substitute.
In 1983, Boston's Parks and Recreation Department started the Park Partners program. It was funded by the National Park Service and provided materials for community groups to initiate and implement improvements to their local park. The program matched public funds with community energy and volunteer time. The Parks Partners Program demonstrated the indispensable role that a community can have in the successful rehabilitation of a park. At one time, there were over 50 groups in the Parks Partners Program. After several years, federal funding for the program came to an end. The city continued funding for a few years, then dropped it.
The Alliance administers a Small Grant Program, a program intended to continue the successes of the Parks Partners Program by making small grants available to community groups for projects on non-park open spaces. The Small Grant Program was a direct recommendation of the Goldberg Seminar and is also funded by the Boston Foundation. First year grants are no higher than $3000, and decrease over the next two years. The money is for materials required for projects on a variety of lands, such as school grounds, public housing developments, libraries, or community centers. The community group provides volunteer time planning and executing the project.
The GreenSpace Alliance has increased the awareness of private citizens and public officials about the importance of the urban landscape and the need for public open spaces in every part of the city. The primary motivation behind the Alliance's support of parks and open space is the belief that well maintained parks, with some level of community control, will promote health, safety, and improved living standards for all the city's residents.