2019 Father Fagan Flower Fund
Help FFP bloom throughout 2019! We're partnering with The Hort to keep FFP clean, green, and flowering.
Leader
Jen Sale
Location
Father Fagan Park New York, NY 10013
About the project
In 2018, the newly renovated Father Fagan Park was unveiled featuring dramatically enlarged planting areas. With the corresponding increased need for gardening and maintenance services in mind, FFP's volunteers have partnered with The Hort and their Green Team to ensure that Father Fagan Park remains a clean, green, and flowering oasis for our many visitors. Your donation will help maintain our neighborhood treasure AND support a job-training program for at-risk youth. We're excited to bring this opportunity to the neighborhood.
More about The Hort and The Green Team:
The GreenTeam provides short and long-term vocational training to youth at-risk, young adults, formerly incarcerated individuals, and homeless youth. The team works year-round on projects that teach plant care, landscape design, and garden maintenance. As participants plant, trim, mulch, weed, and transform neglected parts of the city, they learn valuable life skills: responsibility, time management, and workplace professionalism. When the men, women, and young adults complete the program, they leave not only understanding professional horticulture but are empowered to turn their lives in a new, positive direction.
The Steps
With your support, The Hort will start work on May 1, 2019. We'll hold our first volunteer day soon after.
Why we‘re doing it
The South Village has very little green space. Despite underwriting the park's renovation, the City of New York does not provide gardening services for small parks like ours. Father Fagan Park deserves and needs a tremendous amount of care, especially given the dramatic increase in planting areas and the many and ever increasing number of neighborhood workers and tourists we host (happily!) on a daily basis.
About your neighbors:
In 2013, a group of volunteers came together to host an 'It's My Park Day', a citywide day of park stewardship sponsored by the City Parks Foundation. With the help of neighbors and the local fire department, volunteers reclaimed the memorial tree pits along 6th Avenue which were overgrown with weeds and filled with debris. Our stewardship of the park has grown since that first event; in the past 5 + years we've hosted numerous volunteer days and put hundreds of plants in the park. (You can see photos of past volunteers days on our Facebook page.)