The National Park Foundation (NPF) and National Park Service (NPS) are excited to launch the Love Your Park Network. Love Your Park will encourage more Americans to become stewards of their National Parks and unite diverse partners – conservationists, students, veterans, philanthropists, businesses, and others – to accomplish more through collaboration. Together, this cross-sector group of partners will contribute additional volunteer time, service corps projects, and financial support to parks. For its first pilot theme, Love Your Park is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Rivers and Trails acts. It is funding a variety of pilot projects to drive additional attention and support to the nation’s rivers and trails. We are excited to present the network concept to members of the river and trail communities before publicly launching this work in 2019. Working together, Love Your Park hopes to mobilize the network of partners around shared goals to increase annual contributions of time and money to the parks. In the long term, it hopes to move Americans along the ladder of engagement towards a lifetime of national park stewardship. The network will launch different initiatives every few years around specific rallying cries or anniversaries that are priorities to NPS (e.g., 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage; preserving historic structures in parks). Each initiative will allow a wide array of ways to contribute so that diverse types of partners can participate and benefit from the network. During the presentation, we will cover an overview of the Love Your Park network, give highlights of the pilots underway, discuss practical steps for groups to take to get
involved in the network, and showcase exactly how groups will benefit by joining the network.