With pandemic outdoor programming as a jumping-off point, libraries and Parks departments have continued working together toward common goals

HAPPY TRAILS Madison Public Library, WI’s 2024 Naturalist-in-Residence Alex Booker (l.) leads a Nature Walk at Owen Conservation Park. Photo by Madison Public Library

Once parodied as having a contentious relationship on NBC’s long-running show, Parks and Recreation, in recent years public libraries have found a range of ways to partner with local Parks & Recreation agencies, state parks, and even federal parks to bring residents to green spaces—and bring nature-based programs into libraries as well.

Libraries have “always been related to parks. We’re like cousins or siblings,” says Colleen Miles, head of youth services at Upper St. Clair Library, PA. “But we all used to run on separate tracks. COVID-19 made us realize how much we can use each other” to advance our respective missions.

There is no one way these partners collaborate, but multitudes.

NATURAL(IST) SELECTION

In Madison, WI, for example, this marks the fourth year of Madison Public Library’s (MPL) Naturalist-in-Residence partnership with Madison Parks. Kristina Gomez, now at Milwaukee Public Library, came up with the idea. MPL already had a strong partnership with its Parks department, she says—especially with the city’s Parks Alive initiative—but the residency was “a new model” for working together.

Launched in 2021, the program was not directly a product of the pandemic, but was influenced by it. During the pandemic shutdowns, says Digital Services and Marketing Manager Liz Boyd, the library was “given a directive by the City of Madison to work closely with parks to activate outdoor spaces.” The Naturalist-in-Residence program fit that goal of helping Madisonians achieve the myriad benefits of time in nature made more important during a global pandemic.

The residency lasts six weeks, and new applications are reviewed every spring. The role calls for someone comfortable in front of a crowd, and deeply embedded in the community. The partners invite educators, gardeners, scientists, writers, biologists, and others to apply online through the library’s website. The resident then leads nature-based programming in the summer, both at library branches and in city parks. Library staff work with Terrence Thompson, community services manager for Madison Parks, to review applications for the position and to strategically select under­utilized parks.

Community engagement librarians Michelle Herbrand and Neeyati Shah now run the program, which Herbrand notes is sustainable because it ticks multiple boxes: “Patrons really respond to it, it fits with the library’s strategic goals, program feedback is beyond good, and donors love it.”

Shah adds that it “feels so good to be in the community, and to meet and work with the resident.” The program prioritizes inclusivity, and she’s had patrons thank the library for “centering…BIPOC voices.” Residents have come from a range of backgrounds, including 2023’s Qwantese Dourese Winters and 2024’s Alex Booker, whose passions include reconnecting urban Black Americans with nature.

One goal of the program, notes Boyd, is to emphasize that everyone can be in and enjoy nature. Gomez worked with a nonprofit during its first year to ensure that more rugged outdoor wheelchairs would be available for patrons who needed them.

Given the success of the program, the library hopes to infuse some of the Naturalist-in-Residence’s work into its new Imagination Center at Reindahl Park, a library and community hub developed with Madison Parks that’s currently under development. Boyd hopes the new facility, jointly managed with Madison Parks, will allow the library to embed aspects of the naturalist-in-residence into year-round programming.

SUN, FUN, AND SKILLS  Top row: Madison Public Library’s (MPL) Parks Alive event at Darbo Park in July 2023 featured food, music, games, and more. Middle row, l.-r.: 2024 MPL Naturalist-in-Residence Alex Booker (r.) helps patrons create their own bouquets at a Rustic Floral Arrangements workshop at the Lakeview Library; and heads a Tea Blending workshop. Bottom row: Sarah Branch of Madison-based company Earthly Temptations leads a Sound Bathing program at Elver Park. Photos by Madison Public Library

INTERTWINED MISSIONS

During the height of the pandemic, Bartholomew County Public Libraries, IN, were closed, and library staff were looking for new ways to keep communities engaged. “We started doing over half of our programming in parks,” remembers Children’s Programming Librarian Kate Grafelman. “If it wasn’t virtual, it was in a park.”

Through this relationship, Grafelman discovered that the values of the city’s Parks & Recreation “harmonize perfectly with the library’s own mission,” particularly around access and public service, leading to further opportunities to collaborate.

A similar experience occurred in Pennsylvania. Early in the pandemic, Upper St. Clair Recreation Supervisor Amanda Pozzuto reached out to the library to suggest a StoryWalk in Boyce-Mayview Park.

Thanks to a scannable QR code with a survey at the end of the StoryWalk, the partners have received consistent positive feedback, including from parents who visit the nearby playground, kids at summer camps, and even dog walkers. That success opened the door to collaborative brainstorming; now, says Miles, parks and libraries are “constantly communicating.”

At the same time, Miles wondered, “How can [the library] do something that is not over Zoom?” The answer came in the form of a Poolside Book Club offered to adults at the city’s pool, led by Maureen Case, the library’s head of technical services, in collaboration with Chris Biswick, the town’s aquatics supervisor.

Both the StoryWalk and the Poolside Book Club continue today. Anyone can join the book club, and no pool fees are required. The program has been well attended, with many people intrigued to see a library presence at the pool. The core group is a mixture of “Rec Center and library crowd,” according to Miles.

“I am of the mindset that it’s better to work collaboratively than apart,” says Upper St. Clair Township Library Director Chris Gmiter, “since we are all in this together and our missions are intertwined.”

MERGERS AND MOU’S

Stories like these led the National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) to declare partnerships with libraries as a 2024 “hot program trend.”

Although public libraries and Parks and Recreation agencies have worked together for years, says NRPA Senior Program Manager Maureen Neumann, “what we’ve seen since the pandemic is strengthening partnerships” between the two organizations. “Working in partnership you can go a lot further than on your own. It’s not so much new offerings [as] stronger partnerships and formalized offerings.”

In some communities, the two organizations have even merged. In May 2022, Adam Richter, assistant director of community experiences in the city of Coppell, TX, announced that “our Parks and Recreation Department integrated with the William T. Cozby Public Library to become Community Experiences.” The merger, according to Richter, has led to stronger collaboration across the two departments, including Splish Splash Story Times at pools, photography events at the Biodiversity Education Center, and Summer Reading Kick-Off and Close-out celebrations at parks.

The integration also led to more hands being available in an emergency. During a network outage in 2024, 7,000 books had to be checked in and out manually at the library, and employees from across Community Experiences came together to finish the task. “It was great to have a birds-eye view of people helping people and for the rest of the Community Experiences team [that doesn’t work at the library] to get a better understanding of what our library team is responsible for each day,” says Richter.

These mergers are not without complications, however. In Prescott Valley, AZ, Casey Van Haren transitioned from library director to become the city’s community services director, responsible for the Library, Arts, Parks and Recreation department, in 2020. She then served as the President of the Arizona Library Association in 2023–24. Prior to her taking on the Parks role, she says, the library had “huge competition issues with the prior Parks & Recreation director, and no relationship between the library and Parks & Rec. Since I took over, we are working hand-in-hand and creating some great programs and events for our community.”

With that perspective, Van Haren has been a key proponent for librarians becoming proactive leaders of conversations between the two institutions. At the NRPA conference in September 2022, Van Haren led a session entitled, whimsically, “Punk *** Book Jockeys vs. Nature Freaks and Reckers.”

In other communities, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is used to facilitate those partnerships rather than a merger. Last year, says Trace Stevens, director of Parks and Recreation in Henderson, KY, “we entered into an MOU to host the library’s StoryWalk in one of our parks.” The partnership, says Stevens, “has strengthened foot traffic to the library as well as provided an opportunity for our Nature Center to operate more days of the week. The agreement has expanded to include fee waivers for outdoor shelter reservations for library programming, joint nature-based programming within the library, free room rentals for parks programming in the library, and a joint-programmed StoryWalk in one of our parks.”

Some of these partnerships have existed for years, if not decades. Dale McNeill, assistant director for public service at the San Antonio Public Library, notes that the library’s relationship with the Parks & Recreation Department is so rich and longstanding that many of those collaborations are simply taken for granted.

It is routine for Parks staff to include the library’s playgrounds on their inspection schedules, for example, and to work with the library when it updates playground equipment. The hiring committees of senior positions in both the library and in Parks & Recreation regularly include representatives from the other agency, so that they can “hit the ground running with the partnership” when they come on board, according to McNeill.

LOVING L.A. Top: Los Angeles Public Library’s Expedition L.A. program offers a plein air nature drawing series with Kelvin Nguyen at Lake Balboa Park. Bottom: A nature hike to Ballona Wetlands, with Nature Nexus Institute. Photos by Krystal Messer, Los Angeles Public Library

CLOSING ACCESS GAPS

Whether recently emerging or long-established, a key goal of many library partnerships with Parks is to reduce barriers to access nature and greenspaces, helping activate parks through programming in the process.

In Idaho, Charlene Beach, outreach services specialist at the Coeur D’Alene Public Library, reached out to Farragut State Park Assistant Manager Erin McKindree to ask if the library, while it was closed during the pandemic, could do programming with the department. That partnership has helped close gaps at the state park, where the small staff need to focus on park maintenance and as a result have limited programming capacity.

The library’s presence has “helped people in Coeur d’Alene put a face to a park,” says McKindree, since the park has at least one employee attend each library program who will “stick around and mingle with families and help with set up and take down.” After the programs, Beach adds, “families usually stay to play in the park, or to hike the trails,” some of which have been augmented by StoryWalks.

The understaffed nature of some parks, however, can also lead to challenges. Anastacia Diamond-Ortiz, director of Lorain Public Library System in Lorain County, OH, mentions that as the library has stepped up to help activate parks and greenspaces it has also met with conflicting expectations.

In summer 2024, the city of Lorain finally reopened a pool that had been closed for 20 years owing to economic constraints, and in Mayor Jack Bradley’s State of the City address he said, according to Diamond-Ortiz, “We’ll be opening the pool, and the library will be doing programming at the pool”—which was news to Diamond-Ortiz and her staff. Nonetheless, they were happy to be so visible and to have the opportunity to continue activating outdoor spaces.

Krystal Messer, adult services librarian at Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL), is passionate about reducing access barriers to parks for adult Angelenos. In 2022 and again in 2023, she received grants from the State Library of California’s partnership with California State Parks, focused on reducing barriers to natural spaces. She called the initiative Expedition L.A.

Messer works downtown at LAPL’s Central Library, which she describes as “very, very urban.” Even outside of downtown, “in the metro area there is a lot of concrete. Kids don’t necessarily have a greenspace at their school—it’s all blacktop.”

In organizing Expedition L.A., Messer sought partners who had similar goals, which led her to Nature Nexus, a nonprofit based out of highly urban South Central LA. Messer discovered Nature Nexus had its own grants to pay for transportation, so together the two were able to bus adults from libraries to state parks, enabling “patrons who probably would not have been able to meet us at a park” to participate in programs like a mushroom hike at Malibu Creek State Park. The message, says Messer, is that “nature is for you, even if you don’t look like the people in the REI commercial.”

In that spirit, Messer began promoting the programs among participants in the library’s Adult Literacy Program. Although it did not happen all the time, when pairs of tutors and learners came together to a program in a park, they “learned together as equals. It was very cool to reset that dynamic between the pairs and to get them learning something new” together, she says.

TEACH A KID TO FISH

A park partnership in North Ridgeville, OH, also helps communities learn together. There, an older man who was part of a fishing club realized that kids weren’t learning to fish. He also noticed that a city park that didn’t require a fishing license was located across the street from a branch of the Lorain County Public Library. That led to conversations and partnerships resulting in fishing tackle being made available for checkout at the library, funded by outdoor outfitters Cabela’s Avon, and adult volunteers available to help kids fish during Family Fishing Fun events held offsite at South Central Park.

Libraries often collaborate directly with federal park agencies. In Maryland, the Anne Arundel County Public Library’s Maryland City at Russett branch has a multiyear partnership with the Patuxent Research Refuge, home of the National Wildlife Visitor Center. The two have “worked together to use co-design principles to engage more residents in this natural space,” says Library Associate Lynette DelPrete.

The partnership started when library staff reached out in 2020, and, according to the DelPrete, “the small but mighty staff of the Refuge jumped in with both feet.” Since then, they’ve offered nature programming at the library, have co-led “Storytime, Hike, and Campfire with a Ranger” programs at the Refuge, and offer birding kits for library checkout.

Despite being only four miles from the library, “the Refuge was unfamiliar to many residents who either didn’t know it existed or didn’t know it was open to the public,” notes DelPrete.

GOING SWIMMINGLY Lorain Public Library System’s Little Library on the Lake at Lorain County Metro Parks’ Lakeview Park (top) loans games and sporting equipment to use at the beach; and (bottom) provides a shady spot for library staff to host special beach-themed story times. Photos by Rob Musser

GREENING THE LIBRARY

In addition to activating park spaces, libraries are also activating and transforming their own outdoor areas, often in partnership with parks. As part of the solution to America’s lack of greenspace, Trust for Public Land argued in May 2023 that as a nation we need to “partner with other agencies such as schools, utilities, or libraries to unlock green spaces in nearby public areas.”

In Austin, TX, Community Engagement Librarian Laura Tadena has made greening the branches of the Austin Public Library one of her priorities since 2023. She does this through a partnership with Austin Parks & Recreation called Nature Smart Libraries, supported by the National League of Cities’ Cities Connecting Children to Nature (CCCN) Initiative. The CCCN initiative has also supported partnerships between the San Francisco Public Library and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, as well as similar initiatives in San Antonio and Saint Paul.

In Austin, Tadena says that working with Austin Parks & Recreation has opened doors to new possibilities. At a recent strategy meeting, she visited a Parks & Rec facility that processes boulders and tree stumps to get them ready to incorporate into the landscape architecture of local parks. With this connection, the library can now easily get the supplies it needs to embed nature-based objects into outdoor spaces around the city’s branches: “Rather than buy boulders and tree stumps, we can procure them from our partners at Parks & Rec.”

In Stephens City, VA, the Bowman Library—part of the Handley Regional Library System—is adjacent to one of the few public green spaces in the rural-to-exurban community it serves. Over the years Parks & Recreation has added walking trails, a fishing dock, and an amphitheater to the green space. This investment has “made the library a destination for a lot of people,” says Branch Manager Mary Anton. Since Parks & Rec has no staff daily on site in the green area, librarians are often the ones activating the space through everything from bilingual English/Spanish StoryWalks to yoga in the amphitheater.

During one movie night program, Anton says, “we had two preteens come down the walking trail, and they said, ‘How much is the movie?’ and ‘How much is the popcorn?’” When she told them both were free, the kids “went and got their families and came back, and then the next day the mom came in and got a library card for the family.”

STATE LEVEL SUCCESS

While these partnerships can be powerful, they also require resources. In 2021, California State Parks and the California State Library started a pilot partnership that involved free access to state parks for library cardholders across the state, as well as funding for supplemental programming, such as Expedition L.A.

The initiative was a success, with a survey of those who had borrowed a parks pass from a public library revealing that most (63 percent) considered cost to be their main reason for not visiting state parks previously. The survey showed the program also opened access to low-income and BIPOC Californians, with 70 percent of respondents reporting income levels under $60,000 and 63 percent identifying as BIPOC.

Nonetheless, the long-term existence of the partnership fell under threat in 2023, prompting more than 5,000 advocates to sign petitions and contact their legislators to request continued support. In 2024 the funding was granted, but only through the end of 2025, leaving advocates concerned about the partnership’s long-term viability. However, given the program’s popularity, they remain optimistic they can continue to fund it in perpetuity.

Similar statewide partnerships exist elsewhere, including in Georgia, Virginia, Colorado, and Idaho, among others. In Colorado, when Cristy Moran, adult services consultant for the Colorado State Library, took over the management of the Check Out Colorado State Parks partnership in 2022, she started looking into ways to work not only with State Parks but also local park agencies.

That research led her to Colorado Public Health and Parks and Recreation Collaborative (CO-PHPR Collab), which “encouraged [her] to investigate the potential of bringing libraries to the table of this cross-sector collaborative group,” she says. Moran has attended CO-PHPR’s annual summits since 2023. This year, Moran has worked with staff of the Jefferson County Public Library to help them present at the collaborative’s summit on the topic of “Live Long & Prosper with Libraries,” delivered to a roomful of Parks & Recreation employees, which sparked new connections and collaborations.

Moran said it’s important for these partnerships between public libraries and Parks & Recreation agencies because “we share service populations, missions, value to community, and a need to do more with less.”

ALL LIT UP Local students at the 2024 Lighted Lantern Parade at Longview Park, Rock Island; last held in the 1990s, the parade was revived in 2023 by Rock Island Public Library in partnership with the Parks Department to celebrate the library’s 150th anniversary. Photo by Rock Island Public Library

PARTNERING ON SOCIAL ISSUES

Richard Dolesh, who recently retired from NRPA—the person behind the “hot program trend” statement—sees specific opportunities for stronger collaboration between the two agencies.

A major one, he says, centers around “health and well-being initiatives, especially to address the loneliness epidemic,” as well as “responses to homeless conditions and unhoused people in public libraries and on public lands.”

In June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cities can enforce laws against people sleeping in public, and since then employees of Parks & Recreation agencies in some cities have found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to implement this law.

Parks & Recreation employees are saying, “Wait a minute, we weren’t funded for this, we weren’t trained for this, we don’t have staff for this,” says Dolesh. “Parks & Rec got thrust into the issue of homelessness.”

At this juncture, he sees a major “opportunity to build new partnerships” that get at the root causes of homelessness across America. Some communities have already started to embrace that opportunity.

Stevens, in Henderson, KY, says, “Our library is adjacent to one of our parks, and we interact with the same unhoused people [as Parks & Rec does]. The library has hosted events and offered services for the unhoused,” complementing the services that Parks & Recreation offers for this population. “Our local library is a fantastic partner.”

Todd Winter, of Rock Island Parks & Recreation, IL, says that he’s participating in a community wellness hub study led by the University of Illinois that, when complete, will help libraries, Parks & Recreation, and other agencies work together to address the root causes of substance misuse, loneliness, homelessness, chronic disease, and other societal issues no one agency can address by itself.

Amplifying their roles as opportune partners during the pandemic, Parks & Recreation agencies have become indispensable partners for public libraries grappling with some of society’s thorniest issues—and offering communities expanded access to much-needed green spaces and nature while they’re at it.

Dr. Noah Lenstra, MLIS, is an Associate Professor in the Library & Information Science Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he leads the Public Library Concentration. Since 2016, he has directed Let’s Move in Libraries and in 2023 he published the Cultivating the Relationship-Driven Library toolkit.