A restored Anacostia River and Anacostia Park will make us all healthier
Erin Garnaas-Holmes is the Ambassador to the Anacostia Watershed Urban Waters Federal Partnership and a member of APACC.
This is the second part of a series exploring the “return on investment” (ROI) for cleaning up the Anacostia River and improving its parklands in Washington, DC and Maryland. In these articles, I am exploring answers to the question: “what do we get for all the time and money we are collectively spending on restoring the Anacostia River?”
The returns on our investment aren’t always directly economic, like the green jobs created through increased stormwater management that I wrote about last time. Beautiful parks supported by a robust calendar of activities can also improve mental health, reduce anxiety, build social cohesion, increase community pride and promote spiritual wellbeing. While harder to quantify that strictly economic benefits, these ancillary benefits could nevertheless have a huge impact in underserved neighborhoods like those near Anacostia Park.
Recognizing the Opportunity
Anacostia Park runs through neighborhoods in Ward 7 and Ward 8, which score lower than any other communities in the District of Columbia on numerous health metrics. Many residents of these neighborhoods have been exposed to traumatic experiences, even at young ages, including violence, loss, disrupted families, hunger, and other traumas.
Given this adjacency, Anacostia Park and the Anacostia River are premiere arenas to explore how investment in a natural resource corridor can directly address these issues and support a healthy community. To explore this, the Anacostia Park and Community Collaborative started convening a cohort of organizations last year that included our own members and new partners. Working with the National Park Service and the National Park Foundation, we explored how our programs and events in the park could better serve the needs of its neighbors.
Building our Capacity
Throughout the 2019 season we hosted weekend events in Anacostia Park. Each event featured a theme (e.g. “Go-Go Back”, a celebration of Go-Go music and culture), extended hours for the roller skating pavilion (a national gem and local treasure!), live music, food and other activities. More than 20 partner organizations used these events to build relationships with the thousands of people who attended.
Between these events, we partners gathered in workshops and planning sessions to learn how to modify our program offerings to be more meaningful and valuable to the park’s neighbors. Through online groups and in-person workshops traditionally environmentally-focused organizations were exposed to new ways of thinking. For example, the National Council for Behavioral Health gave an introduction to a “trauma-informed” approach to working with people who have suffered trauma in their lives, which brought together a mix of participants ranging from the Anacostia Watershed Society to the National Reentry Network for Returning Citizens. (We are continuing this series into 2020, and you can stay tuned on the Collaborative website for updates!). By bringing together predominantly white-led environmental organizations into the same room as predominantly black-led, East-of-the-River-based community-focused organizations, we are starting to merge environmental restoration and equitable community development efforts into one.
Leveraging our Investment
There are ample studies that show that having access to healthy outdoor environments improves the physical health of people living nearby (for example, some research demonstrates every $1 spent on building trails saves $3 in future health costs by facilitating exercise). But can we recoup even more from our investments in the Anacostia River corridor? Can park programming and engagement address other community needs, and help reduce future costs of addressing other pervasive social challenges?
Currently, the National Park Service recognizes that Anacostia Park needs improvement, and they are working with the National Park Foundation to launch a new “Friends Group” for the park in 2020. This new philanthropic partner will focus on raising funds for the park. Although the Park Service is traditionally focused on improving the resources of the park itself, not the broader community, we aspire that this network of partners that will help ensure that each dollar raised to enhance the physical environment of the river and parks can go even further than the $3 of health cost savings mentioned above: perhaps a renewed Anacostia Park can become a priceless community asset that also plays a role in building a physically, mentally, socially and spiritually healthy community.