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The Bronx River Alliance was officially created in 2001,
following the formation of the Bronx River Working Group in 1997 and four
years of coordinating work by Partnerships for Parks, a joint program of the City Parks
Foundation and the New
York City Department of Parks & Recreation.
Before 1997, there were 15 to 20 groups
working independently on the river, with little to no coordination among
them. Some of the groups were: Bronx River Restoration, Phipps CDC and the
Gaia Institutue.
This began to change in 1997, when a
federal program, the Urban Resources Partnership (URP), designed to promote
cooperation between agencies on urban conservation issues, facilitated a
brainstorming session among some key support organizations in New York City with respect to the Bronx River.
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At the time, there were about eight
federal agencies involved with the National Parks Service (NPS) being one of them. The NPS
staff person, funded jointly through NPS and the Appalachian Mountain Club
(AMC), saw the potential on the Bronx
River based on the
work that was already going on and convened a meeting with all of the
groups working on the river. Together, the organizations identified the
need for more networking, coordination, and visioning. The groups also
agreed that Partnerships for Parks was the logical entity to help them with
this.
Partnerships for Parks is a joint
program of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation (DPR) and
the City Parks Foundation (CPF). Its mission is “to start, strengthen, and
support neighborhood park groups; to link these groups together so that
they can learn from each other and become stronger collectively; and to
promote involvement in parks so people will join in efforts to restore and
preserve them.” (9) The coalition of group was
interested in working with Partnerships for Parks because the organization
was known not to have an agenda of their own and was affiliated with DPR,
the agency that owned the majority of the land along the river.
The groups wrote a grant
to URP and received $182,500 - $120,000 of which was required to be
regranted and approximately $60,000 of which was to be earmarked for
programming and program support. The grant also had to be matched, which
came from DPR in the form of a staff person - the Partnerships for Parks
Bronx River Coordinator - and staff support. (*crucial strategy *)
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