In 26 cities, Nonprofit Partners Provide a Growing Portion of park funding.
- chasmccabe
- May 29
- 5 min read
By Charlie McCabe
Data collection and analysis is at the heart of the work on the annual ParkScore and City Park Facts reports from the Trust for Public Land. One of the data points I always look at is the percentage of a city’s total park budget contributed from nonprofit partners, a number that ParkScore has included in spending totals since 2018. For a growing number of cities, the percentage is way above the national average of five percent for the 100 largest cities.
So, digging into the data, I’ve compared the 100 largest cities in 2025 to the same data set for 2019 to see what has been happening. The broader context is that spending in parks is up, thanks to a combination of investments, primarily from local government. This particular trend has been driven in large part by cities such as Tulsa, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Detroit, where local government and parks nonprofits are raising funds together in response to a net decline in residents that resulted from loss of traditional industries and businesses that began in the 1960s and 1970s. These cities’ investments have led to some spectacular new and refurbished parks such as Forest Park, Gateway Arch Park, Tower Grove Park and the Great River Greenway system in St. Louis, Gathering Place in Tulsa, Schenley Park (and others) in Pittsburgh, the Olmsted designed parks in Buffalo, and Detroit’s Downtown Parks and Belle Isle.
Cities that are growing and doing well economically are also seeing large amounts of private investment. The most well-known is New York City, beginning with the Central Park Conservancy in the late 1970s (up 11%), but Houston (28%), Boston (26%), Dallas (21%), and Austin (10%) have grown their percentage of nonprofit partners since 2019 contributing a significant portion of funding for programming, operations and maintenance, and capital improvements.
In 2025, of the 101 cities reported in ParkScore, 26 cities get 5 percent or more of their total budgets from nonprofit partners, which means it largely comes from the contributions of individuals, foundations, and local businesses. Another 25 cities get between 1 and 4 percent of total funding from nonprofit partners. [This category includes top 10 ParkScore cities like San Francisco (4%), Arlington VA (2%), Irvine (4%), Minneapolis (1%), Cincinnati (4%), St Paul (1%) and Denver (2%) . But what is still startling to me is that the remaining 48 have no additional funding coming from other sources. Given our economically uncertain times and the fact that local public park systems are often the first to receive budget cuts and the last to see cuts restored, we may be facing challenging times in many of our largest cities.
To understand the context and importance of nonprofit park partner spending, I’ve compared the 2025 results for those 26 cities to the 2019 data, as shown in the table below.
· In 8 cities, the percentage has decreased, but the dollar amount increased: Houston, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Memphis, New York City, Buffalo, New York City, and Seattle.
· In 2 cities, the percentage increased and the dollar amount decreased: St. Louis and Des Moines.
· In 13 cities, both the percentage and dollar amount increased: Detroit, Tulsa, Boston, Philadelphia, Louisville, Dallas, Greensboro, Reno, Stockton, Raleigh, Austin, Milwaukee, and Oakland.
· In 2 cities, both the percentage and dollars amount decreased: Washington, D.C. and Lincoln.
I’ll return to this topic for some of these cities specifically in future posts and will include more of this information in updates to my Partners for Parks report series. But it’s important to note that for a relatively modest investment, cities like St. Louis, Detroit, Tulsa, and Houston have seen some tremendous parks developed and maintained.
My thanks to the Trust for Public Land for compiling and publishing this data annually.
2019 TO 2025 COMPARISON OF NONPROFIT PARKS FUNDING PERCENTAGES
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