October Annual Board Meeting

Friends of Clark Park held our annual board meeting on Monday October 17th at the Spruce Hill Community Association with representation throughout our membership and the community. Our latest year in review for the park included highlights around the return to normalcy we have seen this year. The gardens and clean ups committees have been highly active with volunteers making the park look great. We have seen events and programming successfully return with abundance and capacity building within our organization grow. Fiscally membership and bottom line returned to normal and the organization is in solid financial shape.

One of our largest focuses for the year has been kicking off the Master Plan process. This plan will help define the direction of the park and establish goals for future development and fund raising. This year we kicked off the process and completed an RFP for a successful partner to help lead us in design and community engagement. Following the RFP we are excited to welcome Studio Bryan Hanes to help lead the process and look forward to completing the plan by our 2023 annual meeting. As part of this process we will be including a number of our local partner organizations on the steering committee and soliciting community feedback throughout.

The meeting also was marked by a number of local partners who wanted to engage with the Friends. Uhuru joined to discuss their concerns with the increase in unpermitted vending. They shared how the new vendors are crowding out Uhuru and stealing customers without paying for permits, cleaning and supporting the park. We discussed pursuing potential solutions in partnership with Parks and Recreation and passed around a petition supporting Uhuru. Gwen Snyder, a new mother in the neighborhood, has been working to form ongoing children’s programming in the park and was looking to create partnership with the friends to establish a more regular standing music group for young children. Tom Quinn from the HMS School also joined the meeting looking to build a stronger relationship with the Friends and to work to include students at HMS school in park events.

Finally, the friends held elections for the latest slate of directors and leadership. Our full board can be found here, but we are excited to welcome new board members Sam Korn, Pia Von Barby, Oliver Atwood, Daniel Flichberg, and Reilly Wilson. All new candidates and officers were reelected with unanimous support

Huge Thanks too all who work to make Clark Park the magical place that it is!