Thank you for your continued support of The Parks Alliance. 2014 was a fruitful year for The Parks Alliance. TPA membership has grown to include more than 60 organisations and senior park industry figures from local government parks services, private contractors, industry bodies, NGOs and volunteer and park friends groups.
A number of milestones were achieved by The Parks Alliance last year. We have:
- supported HLF in the launch of State of UK Parks and publicly launched The Parks Alliance in the media and social media
- identified and met the Minister for Parks – Simon Williams MP and won a commitment from him to hosting an invitation-only summit on parks in early new year, detailed in ‘Meeting with the Parks’ Minister’ (below).
- achieved agreement that CIL could be used for Parks;
- held two events – in Birmingham and Windsor
The Establishing Board has recently reviewed its vision, to reflect these achievements and focus on the year ahead. The vision has been published on the ‘The Parks Alliance Vision’ (below).
We have also put in place some rudimentary house-keeping, including setting up our website, and acquiring a bank account and mailing address. We have managed this with contributions in time, value in kind and donations from interim Board members.
This year is shaping up to be a year of growth for The Parks Alliance. The strategic approach for TPA in 2015 is being finalised, and the Board has plans to approach other ministers after the elections, once MPs are in post. The communications efforts of the Alliance will be bolstered by the Landscape Institute’s support, and the Alliance will grow a public profile in the media through monthly PR pushes, as explained in ‘The Landscape Institute supports the Parks Alliance’ (below).
We need to move to the next phase and establish our governance as a Company Limited by Guarantee and appoint a permanent Board to run the organisation. We are in discussion with a company from the sector who may be able to fund the work on establishing our governance arrangements and we aim to achieve our established form by the middle of the year.
In the meantime, all TPA members are invited to email communications@theparksalliance.org with stories about their local parks, important park events, or general park thoughts that would suit a blog posting.
We are looking for photos of parks for a TPA publicity photo collection. Please email communications@theparksalliance.org for any photos of parks, ideally of a) people in parks, b) interesting innovations, c) new parks, d) park events. Anyone who sends through a photo/photos is asked to grant permission for TPA publicity purposes, and to ensure that anyone photographed has given consent for the image.
We now need you to help us. In particular, we need funding to ensure that we can continue to sustain this work. Each of the interim Board members has made a donation of at least £200 cash to get us to this point, but this is not a viable or sustainable business model. We will be establishing membership categories as part of the governance review and looking for you and/or your organisation to join as members. However in the interim, we would welcome a donation, to help us continue this work.
I hope you will agree that we have made significant progress in fighting for the future of the sector and that you will continue to support the cause.
Donations can be made through cheques. Please make the cheque payable to: Chartered Institute of Horticulture, but make it clear it is a donation to The Parks Alliance.
The cheque can be sent to:
The Chartered Institute of Horticulture
Capel Manor College
Bullsmoor Lane
Enfield, EN1 4RQ
Thank you for your continuing support,
Mark Camley, Chairman of The Parks Alliance.
Executive Director of Park Operations and Venues, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park