About the Park Equity Accelerator
What is the Accelerator?
The Lexington Park Equity Accelerator is a new, collaborative project designed to increase access to public space and greenspace in Lexington through public policy.
The program has three main goals:
Address disparities in access to public space and greenspace in Lexington.
Help residents most impacted by these inequities understand how greenspace policy gets created.
Build new ways to bring these residents into the decision-making process of this policy.
The project is being led by LFUCG's Divisions of Parks & Recreation and Planning, CivicLex, and Seedleaf. It is supported by the national non-profit Trust for Public Land (TPL) as one of the six 10- Minute Walk Accelerator programs in the United States.
Why is this important?
Greenspace and public space aren't just nice things to have in a community. Evidence shows that access to greenspace has significant positive effects on public health, climate resiliency, and more.
Addressing inequitable access to greenspace in Lexington is a major priority in a number of important city plans, including the 2018 Parks Master Plan, the 2018 Imagine Lexington Comprehensive Plan, and the 2020 report from the Mayor’s Commission for Racial Justice and Equality. This was further confirmed by results from the 2022 On the Table.
What are the goals?
Research, understand, and address how past and current local policies have led to inequitable community outcomes related to public space, greenspace, and connectivity.
Create more publicly engaged and demographically inclusive resident-led processes for decision-making and policy creation.
Identify strategies to ensure community views and priorities are included in key aspects of city park systems and long-term city planning related to connectivity and greenspace.
Connect residents most impacted by park disparities with the information and capacity to envision and advocate for policy change.
How will we do this?
This project is focused on centering the voices of Lexington residents. We will rely on a coalition of community organizations that are part of and advocate for historically underrepresented communities in Lexington.
During the project we will:
Create new data sets and ground-truth existing data about access to greenspace, public space, and neighborhood connectivity and how they relate to community outcomes.
Gather stories about how residents currently use parks and how/if a lack of access to greenspace and public space is negative.
Host in-park events with community organizations to understand how people use parks and build awareness of the benefits of access to public space.
Host educational workshops with community organizations about how public policy related to greenspace, public space, and connectivity gets created and how to best advocate for changes to that policy.
Launch experimental projects to build stronger connections between residents, public officials, and their parks.
Project Partners
Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government’s Division of Planning's mission is to provide a vision and strategy that will allow Lexington to grow and prosper while preserving, protecting, and enhancing existing neighborhoods, downtown and the rural Bluegrass cultural landscape.
Parks & Recreation, a division of the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government (LFUCG), oversees the programing, maintenance, and development of over 100 city parks and natural areas, six pools, five golf courses, community centers, recreational programs, and three arts venues. To find out more, follow @LexKYParks on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, or sign up for the email newsletter.
CivicLex is a nonprofit civic education & media organization that brings daylight to the issues, policies, and procedures impacting Fayette County. We do our work by making civic information more accessible and bringing together residents and city representatives.
Seedleaf is a community gardening organization that provides horticultural training and supports the practice of gardening and small scale farming in urban space. Seedleaf values the ongoing connection of people to land, the incubation of healthy community interdependence and the cultivation of growers. We believe that this leads to the development of a robust local food economy and a just and equitable system of stewardship over urban land.
Contact Information
Megan Gulla - Director of Programs, CivicLex
Contact: megan@civiclex.org
Christine Smith - Executive Director, Seedleaf
Contact: christine@seedleaf.org
Michelle Olup Kosieniak - Superintendent of Planning & Design, LFUCG
Contact: michello@lexingtonky.gov
Adrienne Thakur - Deputy Director of Recreation, LFUCG
Contact: athakur@lexingtonky.gov
Laura Hatfield - Superintendent for Community Engagement, LFUCG
Contact: lhatfield@lexingtonky.gov
Hannah Crepps - Senior Transportation Planner, LFUCG
Contact: hcrepps@lexingtonky.gov
Boyd Sewe - Senior Long Range Planner, LFUCG
Contact: bsewe@lexingtonky.gov
Valerie Friedmann - Senior Long Range Planner, LFUCG
Contact: vfriedmann@lexingtonky.gov