Our web presence is produced in partnership with Yale Center for Business and the Environment. This web presence is a leading resource for practitioners, investors, conservationists, students and others. Our work draws from a start in and focus on the United States and touches on international approaches. We produce original content and curate the work of other organizations. We create news, research, policy, training and convenings related to conservation finance. We cover all the world’s ecosystems including forests, agriculture, oceans, cities and rivers.

Project Leadership Team

Leigh Whelpton, Program Director, Conservation Finance Network

Overview of Parks with purpose

What Can a Park Do? Click on the images to find out.

• Parks can transform blighted spaces into a community asset. The image on the left shows the chronic flooding in Atlanta’s west side neighborhoods near the future site of Kathryn Johnston Memorial Park. Image on the right shows a rendering of the new park along with its many community assets.

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• Parks can provide opportunities for job training and employment. Our partners at The Greening Youth Foundation’s work with diverse, underserved and underrepresented children, youth and young adults in an effort to develop and nurture enthusiastic and responsible environmental stewards. Photo by Whitney Flanagan. 
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• Parks can offer ecosystem services such as storm water retention, remediated air and water, and erosion control. Vine City Park is one of Atlanta’s first Parks with Purpose. The park had been an abandoned lot until the Fund bought the land and transformed it. The City of Atlanta now owns the park and the community has a place to enjoy the outdoors. Photo by Claire Cooney.
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• Parks can help to build more empowered and resilient communities. Peer Exchange tour of Lindsay Street Park, guided by a talk from neighborhood resident Mother Moore. Photo by Zhivko Illeieff. 
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• Parks can engage all ages in environmental education, stewardship and advocacy.
  
  Stephen Causby (left), resident and manager at Mattie Freeland Park, talking about the work of the local community in creating and maintainig the park. Photo by Robin McKinney.
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• Parks can provide food resources for communities that lack access to healthy foods.
  
  In the fall of  2016, The Conservation Fund  acquired 7.1 acres of land on Browns Mill Road in southeast Atlanta.  This site will become Atlanta's first Community Urban Food Forest, as well as a new model for a City of Atlanta park. Photo by Browns Mill Food Forest.
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Browse through our parks with purpose Projects:

We help communities identify their conservation priorities and goals, recommend high impact, cost- effective implementation strategies, and help build the capacity of communities to fulfill their conservation visions. Through the use of maps, GIS modeling, and determining the economic benefit of ecosystem services, we evaluate areas for land protection and stewardship while identifying opportunities to integrate planning for green and gray infrastructure.

We forge partnerships—with municipal partners, utilities, community organizations, state and federal agencies and the private sector—to protect water quality and build resilient communities. For nearly three decades, the Fund has been an innovative leader in planning and implementing multiplebenefit green infrastructure projects and a source of cutting-edge research on sustainable freshwater conservation strategies.