On March 23rd, we celebrated our 10th Annual Stewardship Workshop with teachers, parents, parent coordinators, and after-school providers from 20 of our NYC school playground sites. The event brought school communities together to share resources, strategies, and success stories on keeping schoolyards vibrant, beautiful, and safe. This year’s program had a stellar line-up of speakers, including NYPD Community Affairs officers to address safety and positive-use strategies the chair of the Environmental Education Advisory Council to discuss professional development and resource sharing, Educators from NYS Department of Environmental Conservation, Audubon-NY, ASLA-NY, NYC DOE Office of Sustainability to share free programming opportunities, and our newest partner, New York Road Runners to discuss youth running and physical literacy programs.
The schools brainstormed ideas for making use of our Stewardship Resource mini-grant and came up with a myriad of ideas to foster positive school and community use in their yards. The ideas that came out of this workshop included family stewardship days, movie nights, gardening programs, track events, community health days, and “Fatherhood Olympics”. In celebration of our 10th year of the workshop, we also selected Bunny Sheffield from Central Park East to receive our “Star Steward Award”. In addition to praise for her amazing outreach efforts, she received an outdoor microscope for close-up garden exploration.
Playground Resources 