Volunteer groups help maintain NYC parks as budget remains flat

New York City parks have been operating on a slim budget for years, but volunteers are stepping up across the city to keep green spaces maintained.

Largely restricted from the use of power tools or heavy equipment by the parks department, small teams of volunteers diligently clear catch basins, maintain paths and battle back weeds threatening to crack the concrete on the city’s only velodrome.

Advocates say volunteer labor has increasingly become part of how city parks are maintained, with regular New Yorkers giving up valuable free time to tend the grounds of green spaces that have become more popular since the pandemic. The shadow network of unpaid infrastructure workers steps in where the budget has continued to fall short, acting as a first line of defense against worsening extreme weather.

Heather Lubov, executive director of the nonprofit City Parks Foundation, launched the organization's "NYC Green Fund" in 2020, when budget cuts hit the parks department hard.

“Suddenly there was no money to go around, and parks were completely packed. I mean, it was the only place you could go,” Lubov said.

She said her organization gives away roughly $2 million to $3 million a year to community groups but can only fund 25% of the requests for help it gets. Demand is growing. The number of groups applying for microgrants has jumped 54% since 2023, according to the foundation.

“ We raise that money, and then we re-grant it right back out. We fund groups with no budget at all, no bank account at all,” she said.

Leona Chin founded the volunteer group Kissena Synergy, which maintains pathways in the park in Flushing, Queens, and clears catch basins before storms.

Her fight to preserve Kissena Park began after she organized local families to clean up the velodrome where her daughter raced bikes. She said her daughter crashed after her front wheel jammed in a hole in a shoddy corner of the track where weeds have damaged the concrete. The episode underscored the importance of volunteer weeding, Chin said.

“It would have been worse had we not started keeping tabs on all the weeds around the velodrome,” Wong said.

Her work expanded to stewardship of the surrounding forest and wetlands.

“The weeds are back up because of all of the recent rain. We're just so proud that the trees are still alive, and they're thriving. And our job is just to maintain because Parks just doesn't have the capacity,” she said.

Chin said grant money from the NYC Green Fund has helped buy tools to help with the work.

“ As volunteers we're not allowed to have electric or gas-powered tools, so we have to do everything manually. A lot of the funding goes towards our loppers and hand tools,” she said.

Lubov, the nonprofit director, said she is optimistic about mayor Mamdani making good on his campaign promise to deliver 1% of the budget for city parks. Until then, she said, volunteers are likely to keep filling in the gaps where they can.

“Do I want volunteers to be doing maintenance work? No. I want them to be doing other things, but are they doing what they feel they need to do at this moment in time,” she said.

The city’s parks department sits at around .05% of the city’s $127 billion budget. City Hall did not respond to a request for comment.

For volunteer groups like Chin’s, the city’s annual budget dance looms over the summer of volunteer work.

“Each fiscal year, we dread July 1,” Chin said. “We’re always afraid that we’re gonna lose one of our parkies [park workers], one of our supervisors, one of our managers, one of our trainers, because we work with them so well.”

Correction: This story was updated to correct the increase in the number of groups who have applied for NYC Green Fund grants since 2023.