The cautionary tale of the San Francisco Parks Alliance

By Charlie McCabe

The recent news that the long-running San Francisco Parks Alliance is closing its doors for good is a rare and shocking reminder of the fundamental accountability and vigilance required in nonprofit management.

For more than 20 years, the Alliance has served as the go-between for the city’s recreation and parks department and as many as 80 volunteer groups and community organizations, acting as fiscal sponsor for those groups and demonstrating the benefits of the citywide parks nonprofit model.

At issue is the fact that the organization has either misspent or lost millions of dollars in funds that were targeted for park improvements and programming. Most of these funds were raised by an array of informal, all-volunteer friends of parks groups that relied on the Alliance to hold those funds in trust until needed. Last year, a small but growing number of those friends groups noted that their requests for disbursement were going unanswered or once acknowledged, were a long time in coming.

While we wait for the full story to be revealed, it’s important to stress that the standards and practices in which all nonprofits must operate seems to be the bigger issue here. Park (including citywide) nonprofits are a bit different than other nonprofits. Here are four key ways that they differ:

1. Generally, the goal of park nonprofits working with city park and recreation agencies is to supplement, not replace, the public agencies’ work. This is usually accomplished by:

(a) advocating for city residents’ need for parks and recreation and for consistent, continuous public parks and recreation funding;

(b) raising funds from individuals, foundations, and corporations and;

(c) providing programs, services or improvements that public agencies cannot provide due to insufficient funding or expertise or because it’s outside their charter or scope.

2. In most cases, public funds are not a source of funding for parks nonprofits. While there are exceptions, they are usually well documented and well-managed processes, including rigorous reporting requirements, and written agreements between public agencies, nonprofits, and funders. Applications for public funding are well documented public processes and quite rightly are subject to high levels of scrutiny.

The exception would be an earmark or outlay obtained through an annual budgeting process or capital funding processes but still subject to public hearings and public votes by elected officials, with specific reporting requirements after funds are received and spent. Public funds come into play as a piece of a larger fundraising effort by the parks nonprofit, usually for a capital project or a specific programming effort. (This is also true for donations from corporate groups or grants from nonprofit foundations.)

3. Trust accounts — or fiduciary partner or service accounts — are a standard part of the way citywide parks nonprofits work to provide additional services for friends of parks groups working with the public parks and recreation agencies as well as citywide park nonprofits. Simply put, this is safeguarding and managing other peoples’ money. Given that funds are held by the nonprofit in trust for the individual groups, careful management and reporting are key. There are some great organizations that do this well in cities across the U.S., including the Seattle Parks Foundation, the Los Angeles Parks Foundation, the Austin Parks Foundation, Park Pride (Atlanta), and City Parks Foundation (NYC).

4. Like any nonprofit, parks nonprofits are corporations, overseen by volunteer boards of directors and adhering to federal, state, and local guidelines. Annual nonprofit tax returns, audits or financial reviews are required and subject to best practices for all nonprofits. Further, while the board of directors hires and manages the CEO or executive director (as the CEO is often called in many nonprofits), the CEO/ED is responsible for overseeing the staff and ensuring compliance with applicable regulations and guidelines.

In both the current case of the San Francisco Parks Alliance and last year’s case of the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, it appears that one or more senior staff have been responsible for fiscal mismanagement, which should have been caught by oversight policies and processes which should receive regular review by board of directors’ committees. In both cases, when the issues were discovered or revealed, the CEO resigned as a result.

Nonprofits, like public agencies, are entrusted with funds that people and communities rely on for their well-being. They are a supplement to city services and must hold themselves to a high standard. Having run a citywide parks nonprofit myself (Austin Parks Foundation, 2005–2012), I’m dumbfounded as to how the board of directors and senior staff at the Alliance could have dropped the ball in so many ways (not all of which we know about yet).  

If you want to learn more about citywide nonprofits and how they work, check out part two of my report Partners for Parks: The Role of Citywide Park Nonprofits.

Thanks to Adena Long for pointing out I had incorrectly mentioned that national City Parks Alliance, versus the NYC based City Parks Foundation.

Copyright 2025, Charlie McCabe Consulting LLC