In the third quarter of 2017, President Donald Trump donated his salary to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to help address the opioid crisis. He previously gave quarterly salary installments to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Parks Service.
For cities, a $100,000 donation ($78,333.32 after taxes) for first quarter 2018 could buy a lot of things. Myriad essentials, really -- naloxone kits, stop the bleed kits for schools, disaster recovery funding and more.
Park & Recreation might be a great fit, because while people love and cities need parks, it’s not always the top line item for city budgeting. Things like keeping city park lights on at night in summers -- which has been found to reduce incidences of violence -- or paying lifeguards or purchasing project materials sometimes need to wait behind necessities like paying winter road maintenance costs and funding public safety priorities.
But a gift to a city’s park and rec is always welcome, and it could offer positive reinforcement for community development, future city revenues and intangible social positives.
Take a recent donation of $100,000 in the form of 10,000 cubic yards of dirt to the city of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, by developer Lloyd Companies. It’s going to be used, along with donated land grading services, for the $4.2 million Levitt at the Falls amphitheater project, according to the Argus Leader.
By saving those dollars, it allows us to do more with our project than we would have otherwise,” said Sioux Falls Parks Director Don Kearney, and the donation also ups the construction timeline.
A quick look at GoFundMe finds cities in need of park and recreation donations:
Douglass City, Kansas, a small town of under 2,000 people had only been able to raise about $2,000 of the $60,000 it needs to replace playground equipment at its city park. “The existing equipment has been there for generations. It has served us well but it’s clearly time for new, vibrant and forever lasting equipment the community youth can enjoy for years to come,” according to the campaign story. The organizer appears to have given up.
Parkesburg Point, a community organization focused on empowering at-risk youth and their families in Chester County, Pennsylvania, wants an outdoor skate park that promotes the message of drug prevention and raises awareness around the dangers of substance abuse, according to its crowdfunding campaign story. But in two years, it’s raised less than $1,500 of its $40,000 goal.
The Baltimore City Recreation and Parks department is looking to raise $10,000 to open a forest immersion program in Baltimore City at the Gwynns Falls Trail. The goal is creating access to nature-based early childhood education for all through the crowdsource campaign launched in mid-2017.
