Revitalize Parks to Strengthen Democracy

Stanford Social Innovation Review · Summer 2024

Co-authored by Howard Frumkin, Nature and Health co-founder and Steering Committee member

Tucked away in the Cascade Mountains of Central Washington, amid miles of hiking trails and fruit orchards, sits Methow Park on the south side of the small town of Wenatchee. In stark contrast with the verdant ecoregion, Methow Park once embodied the community’s inequitable living conditions: a patchy soccer field, two netless basketball hoops, and deteriorating playground equipment. More than 4,200 people lived within a 10-minute walk of the one-acre park, the vast majority of whom are Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers in an otherwise white and middle-class town.

In 2014, Trust for Public Land (TPL), a national conservation organization that creates parks and protects land for people, was invited by the City of Wenatchee to engage residents in renovating Methow Park. For more than a year, conventional attempts at involving the community, such as meetings in school gyms and online surveys, saw poor results. Besides, renovating a park seemed trivial compared with the community’s broader civic and health concerns. South Wenatchee residents had experienced decades of city disinvestment, underrepresentation in local government, and an absence of Latino advocacy groups.