1/28: First-Timer Meeting for It’s My Park Day Potential Project Leaders

Hey there:

Well, it’s that time of year again: time to begin planning for It’s My Park Day! This year, the event proper is held on March 3rd. If you are interested in leading a work day at your favorite park and have never done so, please join us for our First-Timer Meeting on January 28, 2012. We are scheduled to meet at the Austin Recreation Center at 2p.

This meeting is also great to attend if you’ve led an It’s My Park Day project, but it’s been awhile since your last event. If you plan to attend, please RSVP via email to Becky@austinparks.org, with “First-Timer Meeting” in the subject line.

Looking forward to seeing you at the meeting!

For First-Timers and Veterans alike: our Project Leader Meeting will be on February 7 at 7:00p. More on that later…

Warm wishes,

Becky

WHO: Us
WHAT: First-Timer Meeting for It’s My Park Day
WHEN: January 28, 2012, 2:00p – 3:30p
WHERE: Austin Recreation Center, 1301 Shoal Creek Boulevard, Austin, TX 78701
WHY: Because Austin’s parks rock — and so do you!
HOW: Walk, ride your bike, take the bus, drive — the options are endless…

It’s My Park Day On Barton Creek Greenbelt

First, our thanks to everyone at  all of our project sites who braved a windy and rainy start to this year’s It’s My Park Day.

Brian and Martha setting stone to form pathway.

Before we began...

We were gathering our volunteers at about 8:45 am at Spyglass Access Trail when 10 minutes of rain (and some thunder and lightening blew through.  By 9:10 am, we were headed down the trail and the sun came out by 10 am.  Our thanks to 40 very hard working volunteers, including our great Barton Creek Trail Corps crew (Allen, Brian, Sara, Kristen and Joe) as well as leaders Kevin and Martha from the Central Texas Trail Tamers.

much better!

Our job was to raise & resurface about 200 feet of trail that had been badly damaged by flooding last sumer.  The trail had formed a classic U shape, so no water could drain to the creek.  So, we cut channels to allow the trail to drain,  we gathered and hauled big flat rocks to allow for a smooth walking, running and pedaling surface, fitting them into place and surrounding them with hundreds of buckets of gravel.  We finished nearly all of that initial stretch and will be returning on future workdays to top the gravel and add some additional stones.

Martha, Kevin and Brian working to move flat rocks into position

A big thank you to all of the rest of our volunteers: Michael, Justin, Ivan, Dan, Lisa, Ryan, Christine, Kathleen, Ken, Marla, Aaron, Kathleen, Kelly, Kevin, Cassidy, Elisa, Lindsey, Laura, Craig, Mary Beth, Lisa, David, Lisa, Luis Ezra, Cy, Karen, Ryan, Liz, Laura, Hill and Ed! We got an AMAZING amount of work done.

Some of the team of 8 using a rock cradle to move big flat rocks into position

Before, looking south toward New Wall Dodgeway

After, looking south toward New Wall Dodgeway

It’s My Park Day Photo & Story Contest

With over 2,500 volunteers heading out to parks tomorrow, we should be able to get some good pictures and some good stories.  So, we thought, why not have a contest and offer prizes?  So, we are!  We’ll give $50 gift certificates to REI for the best photo, the best photo featuring an It’s My Park Day t-shirt and the best story.  All you need to know is right here.

 

Park Projects You Can Volunteer At On It’s My Park Day

We now have over 2,200 volunteers signed up for 72 separate park projects in parks across Austin.  That said, we still have over 800 volunteer spots available.  Here are a few where we’d love to have help.  Click on the link to sign up!

• Montopolis Greenbelt - Vargas, off of Montopolis Drive. Invasive removal and big clean-up.  77 spaces available. Sign Up Now.
• Williamson Creek Greenbelt – Big clean-up.  south central. 49 spaces available.  Sign Up Now.
• Republic Square – downtown – planting, mulching and weeding. 35 spaces available. Sign Up Now.
• Pease Park – central.  mulching, mulching and more mulching.  95 spaces available.  Sign Up Now.

Have You Registered for It’s My Park Day Yet?

It’s time!  March 5th @ 9 am will be here before you know it.  We have 68 projects with 3,000 volunteers needed.  Opportunities are available on a wide variety of projects and park locations across the city.  Sign Up Here!

It’s Time to Love Your Park!

Join us for the 9^th annual It’s My Park Day on March 5^th.

Registration is now open for Austin Parks Foundation’s ninth annual It’s My Park Day. 3,000 volunteers are expected to attend to spend a half a day at one of over 60 improvement projects in parks across Austin.

Visit www.austinparks.org to sign up to volunteer.

And what do you get?  The satisfaction that you’re working with friends and neighbors. The knowledge that you are helping our parks department by planting trees, rebuilding trails, removing non-native trees and plants, cleaning up creeks and mulching trees. You’ll also get a great looking t-shirt with our slogan “love your park.”

In 2010, we had over 2,500 volunteers work at 68 park improvement projects donating 8,750 hours to our amazing parks system in a single day.  We are working to top that in 2011.

So join us at Zilker Park to plant trees, at several Barton Creek Greenbelt locations to work on trail restoration projects or in many parks across Austin to spread mulch, paint play scapes, pick up trash and much more.

www.austinparks.org is the place to find out more about It’s My Park Day and to sign-up to volunteer.

Our thanks to our key partner for It’s My Park Day, the City of Austin’s Parks and Recreation Department, for their tremendous support in organizing this year’s event.  More information about Austin’s amazing park system is at www.ci.austin.tx.us/parks/

Our thanks to our presenting sponsor, Wheatsville Food Co-op, our major sponsors CTK | Community TechKnowledge, Texas Gas Service and Jackson Walker LLP.  Our thanks to our ever-growing list of sponsors: MFI Foundation, BMC Software, Backwoods, URS, REI, CA Technologies, Frost Bank, HS&A, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, 12 Oaks Dental, Cisco Systems, Hill Country Outdoors. MWM Design Group, Austin Simply Fit, DWG Landcape Architecture, EnviroMedia Social Marketing, Texas Rowing Center, The Garden Club of Austin, Clif Bar, Ivy Block, Advanced Organic Materials, Randalls, and Tecnu Extreme.

It’s My Park Day – Projects, Leaders, Sponsors & Yard Signs

Here at It’s My Park Day HQ (aka the Austin Parks Foundation office) we’re working away on a number of different It’s My Park Day projects, but we wanted to remind you of a few important items:

1) Project Registration is Open. We now have nine projects with a total of 780 Volunteer opportunities.  Our goal is 60-70 projects with 3,000 volunteers needed.  So, if you’ve led a project before, it’s time to register. If not, but you’re interested, please plan on attending a Feb 5 information meeting for first time Project leaders.

2) If you’re interested in being a project leader, but have no specific project in mind, let us know at apf@austinparks.org.  We’ll find you a spot!

3) Our Sponsors.  We love them and you should to.  As of today, we like to thank our presenting sponsor, Wheatsville Food Co-op.

We’d like to thank our major sponsors CTK | Community TecKnowledge, Jackson Walker LLP and Texas Gas Service.

We’d like to thank all of our other sponsors – MFI Foundation, Backwoods, BMC Software, URS, Hill Country Outdoors, Enviromedia Social Marketing, Austin Simply Fit, Texas Rowing Center, Advanced Organic Products, Ivy Block, Technu, Clif Bar, and REI.

We are welcoming sponsors through Feb 4th, a sponsorship of $1,000 and above gets your logo on the back of 3,400 volunteer T-shirts.

4) And how about that yard sign?  Pretty cool, eh?  We’re grateful to Enviromedia Social Marketing for their design of the t-shirt and associated graphics, including the yard sign.

This Year’s Model

and by that we mean this year’s T-shirt design for all It’s My Park Day Volunteers.  Yup, it’s got the “love your park” theme again and is a nice deep red.  Definitely going to stand out when volunteers are wearing them!  On the back will be all of our sponsors logos. (There’s still time to become a sponsor and get on the T-shirt – visit our Sponsors page)

2 Months to It’s My Park Day!

What do the following companies have in common: Wheatsville Food Co-op, Jackson Walker LLP, Community TechKnowledge, Texas Gas Service, BMC Software, URS, MFI Foundation, Technu Extreme, REI, Clif Bar, Hill Country Outdoors and Texas Rowing Center?

They are all sponsors of the 2011 edition of It’s My Park Day, which is coming up on March 5, 2011.

Our sponsors make It’s My Park Day possible, helping us provide tools, supplies, water jugs, T-shirts, and snacks.  They allow us to provide truckloads of mulch, 30 shovels, big piles of compost and more more to the 60 to 70 volunteer projects we expect to see on a single day.

Sponsorships can be a combination of cash and in-kind donations and there are different levels of sponsorship that come with different levels of benefits.  Sponsorships of $1000 or more get your organization’s logo on the backs of 3,400 volunteer t-shirts and on our website and in email and newsletters.

The deadline for sponsors to get on the volunteer T-shirt is Friday, Feb 4th, 2011.  More information is our website or you can call and speak with Charlie at 512-477-1566 ext 2.

Project registration will open Wed, Jan 12, 2011.  We’ll announce it here.

It’s My Park Day – Wooldridge and Republic Squares

We had a downtown squares double-header for It’s My Park Day – we spent the morning at Wooldridge (officially 100 years old!) spreading 46 cubic yards of mulch around all of the big trees, as well as bare spots and also began the process of scraping and sanding down the railings on the gazebo for a big paint job to begin later this spring.  Mayor Lee Leffingwell thanked our 80 volunteers for helping out and then grabbed a shovel and started piling mulch into a wheelbarrow. We had over an hour of music too from the Inside Out Steel Band which made our task a little easier!  Our thanks to Mark Holzbach and Michael McGill who sheparded our efforts there.

At Republic Square in the afternoon, we planted over 1600 plants – mostly native grasses, low mounding flowering plants and some yuccas.  Lots of digging and the ground was really hard in spots (owing to the Square’s previous life as a parking lot!)  But we got them all in – our tremendous thanks to Kim Mizner and Jacob Walker, along with Daniel Woodroffe, who coordinated the planting.