Nature makers: The Parks Foundation

13-03-2025

Strong governance is a vital ingredient for a successful partnership and sets the foundation up to work independently from the council. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), project agreements and foundation-specific email addresses will help to underpin your intentions, rationalise decisions to senior stakeholders and lend credibility to your actions every step of the way.

Creating and nurturing the first years of a foundation partnership calls for someone who can simultaneously see the big picture, whilst focusing on the detail. They’ll be responsible for regulatory compliance, managing things like the constitution, Memorandum and Articles of Association, policies and insurances. They’ll also work with the trustees to create the vision, strategy, plans and staffing needs.

Until you’re up and running with sufficient working funding in place, focus on generating short-term income that gets the biggest result. Grants from trusts and foundations can be less resource-intensive than generating the same income through individual donors. As time goes on you can start testing different funding streams.

With working funds in place, think about how to diversify the foundation’s income. As an enterprise arm of the council, a parks foundation is a great way to bring philanthropy and earned income as well as grant funding into green space management. Broadly speaking you should aim for an even split between the three revenue streams, from legacies to café leases and grants from NGOs.

We can’t emphasise enough how important it is to get local people involved from the beginning. Community research and co-design can build relationships and help draw out their ideas. Engage communities at the start to identify potential park locations and help create the designs. Show the vital role they can play with volunteering events like bulb planting or pond creation. As well as nurturing trust, it gives you a clear mandate to grow sustainable long-term funding and support.

A distinct voice, branding and image to that of your council sets the foundation up for having different conversations with funders and partners. A simple unique selling point will make it easier to bring people on the journey with you, including the route to accessing charity funding the council can’t reach.

Identify the type of green spaces that are right for this partnership to focus on. For example, it could be a neighbourhood park, destination sites or nature reserves. It can also help to prioritise the type of green space and projects that will bring about the most impactful changes for people and nature. Tree planting, sustainable urban drainage systems or things like house martin towers on council-owned green spaces win the hearts and minds of the community, whilst reinforcing support for local plans and the foundation.

Your reach can be multifaceted – helping people’s health and wellbeing, reducing social isolation, encouraging community growing and supporting local community groups. Think about how a foundation would communicate with different audiences to achieve this. In-person initiatives may be more impactful for under-represented groups. Regular updates via your communication channels – digital and print – will be key to nurturing relationships with wider park users and residents, councillors, funders and partners.

You can think even bigger by developing partnerships across the council and health teams. The Parks Foundation opens its doors to local and national charities, schools and youth groups, and residents’ associations. Or build relationships with funders such as The National Lottery Heritage Fund, other NGOs, community funds and local providers and businesses. Together you could increase your reach, working across multiple sites, engaging more stakeholders, maximising your scale of delivery and increasing health and wellbeing benefits.