GAINESVILLE, Fla. – The City of Gainesville Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs Department is honored to announce that it has been selected by the RAND Corporation, the City Parks Alliance and the Trust for Public Land as a good fit to study neighborhood parks. The project is funded by the National Institutes of Health, and only 25 departments were selected in the country.
This spring, trained field staff will visit eight of Gainesville’s local neighborhood parks on several different occasions to measure how our neighborhood parks are used. One of the primary goals of the study is to identify and disseminate best practices.
“We are excited and proud of this project. Our department has been selected to highlight best practices in neighborhood parks because of the work done by our staff, working as a team, placing our department on the map. We recently received national accreditation and are one of 119 agencies in the nation to have done so. I believe this is a reason we have been selected for this prestigious research project,” says Steve Phillips, director for the Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs Department.
The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis. RAND focuses on the issues that matter most such as health, education, national security, international affairs, law and business, the environment and more. With a research staff consisting of some of the world’s pre-eminent minds, RAND has been expanding the boundaries of human knowledge for more than 60 years. As a nonpartisan organization, RAND is widely respected for operating independent of political and commercial pressures.
City Parks Alliance is a national network of urban park and recreation leaders working to increase investment in our nation’s urban parks. Trust for Public Lands is a national organization dedicated to improving park access across the United States.
For more information, please contact Steven R. Phillips, director of the City of Gainesville Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs Department at 352-393-8755 or [email protected].
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