Article and photos by Yulia Rock
On a recent Saturday morning, five volunteers eager to clean the Harlem River’s shoreline at Sherman Creek Park in Inwood, in northern Manhattan, were stymied by nature as high tides delayed the work. On this Stewardship Day, Shakara Petteway, a volunteer manager for the New York Restoration Project, was forced to take her team to clean elsewhere.
“It is hard to coordinate schedules with nature,” said Petteway. “We can try to clean up other parts of the park today. Hopefully next time the tides will be low.”
The five volunteers and three employees of the NYRP, all women, handed out bottles of bug spray, anti-itch creams for poison ivy, sunscreen lotion and cold bottled water; everyone was required to sign a waiver and provide an emergency contact before getting to work.
“You never know who has an ivy allergy,” said Petteway.
NYRP is among the nonprofits that try to help, focusing its efforts on neglected neighborhoods. Founded by Bette Midler, in 1995, it raises millions of dollars each year in contributions and now owns 52 community gardens and stewards four parks in the city. In 2015, NYRP received $8.9 million in donations and spent about 80 percent of that on conservation projects, the group’s financial statements show.
Sherman Creek Park, situated on 15 acres of rich land at the eastern end of Academy Street, offers a place to launch kayaks and enjoy picnics with a river view.
New York City has more than 1,700 parks, and while the most celebrated – Central Park; Prospect Park in Brooklyn; Van Cortlandt Park, the city’s largest, in the Bronx – are well-funded, many of the smaller ones struggle.
“Nonprofits, such as NYRP, help to support parks and the community by tackling projects on public and private land, something the city agency cannot do,” said Rosemarie Miner, the organization’s Citywide Volunteer Program Coordinator. “Nonprofits are generally not as tied up in bureaucracy as city agencies and can work faster, and even on the fly, with community-based organizations.”
The city’s parks and community gardens rely heavily on volunteers.
“During the fiscal crisis in the ’70s there was not enough money and many organizations started up funds by wealthy people to help fix up the parks,” said former Deputy Director of Planning Joseph P Chu. “The Central Park Conservatory was the first because it had so many rich people that live near the park. Others like the nonprofit Prospect Park Alliance started later on. Those and many other organizations still exist. They supplement the city’s funding.”
The announcements about volunteer events are constantly being posted at the NYRP and the New York City Department of Parks websites. Despite that, attendance is often low. Volunteers play a vital role in the city’s communities and, according to Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), a federal agency, volunteers contributed 352.6 million hours of work. That equates to almost $15.5 billion in New York alone. As such, donated funds can be used to build more parks and create more public facilities such as playgrounds.
“Volunteers are important because they give people an opportunity to form a deeper connection with the space they use recreationally,” said Miner. “It is also a way for people to build as stakeholders in a community.”
At Sherman Creek Park, Maria Marte, an event planner who brought her family for a picnic and birthday party, said it was their second visit. “We love how clean and peaceful this park is. Kids love it,” she said.
Before NYRP became a steward of Sherman Creek Park, it was a place for illegal dumping. “In the past, we used to find buried cars in this park,” Petteway said.
NYRP provided the cleanup crew with gloves, trash pickers and garbage bags. The group divided into “pickers” and “bag holders.”
“Oh, there is a buried black plastic bag, I don’t know if I want to pull it out,” one volunteer said. Miner smiled and recalled that some volunteers had once stumbled upon dead bodies in a plastic bag. “It happened years ago and not in this park,” she added.
None of the women shied away from carrying heavy trash bags. “It gives me a peace of mind,” said Kathy Peng on her way home after three hours of volunteering. “It is Saturday morning, and I’ve already done something useful.”