What We DO

The Akron Parks Challenge invites neighborhood residents, leaders and organizations alike to pitch their vision for their favorite park and how they can partner to achieve the change they wish to see. We've improved nine parks since 2018.

Beyond Akron Parks Challenge projects, we are offering small grants to neighborhood residents and groups for park improvement projects. Projects must be physical improvements to parks and recipients will work with Akron Parks Collaborative and the City for approval, purchasing and installation.

Most of the Friends of Parks groups were founded through the Akron Parks Challenge process. These neighborhood volunteers organize programs and help maintain and clean up their parks saving the city time and money.

We partner with the City and Keep Akron Beautiful to organize Akron Parks Week annually; a celebration of our neighborhood parks with volunteer opportunities and programs.

We hire a landscape architect to guide concept planning and we also bid and manage construction projects for our Akron Parks Challenge sites.

We serve as the community partner for KaBOOM! Projects, helping to organize and support outreach and neighborhood engagement.

We engage communities around rebuilding tree canopy in parks and city-owned vacant lots. We also engage communities interested in maintaining orchards in their neighborhoods.

We wrote and managed a grant from the Tree Fund to work with Summit Lake Build Corps as a pilot in planting trees on city-owned vacant lots. We work with the Mayor’s Office, our Friends groups and neighborhood groups to write grants for program and capital projects.

We worked with the city and managed the project to create design guidelines for signage in parks, recreation centers and on trails.

We support city efforts to improve access to programs: We serve as the fiscal agent for the YES (Youth Empowerment Scholarship) program, offering scholarships for Recreation Bureau programs.