CALE - Transforming Schoolyards for Community Resilience

Community Adaptation Learning Exchange - November 30, 2023

Parks are essential for healthy, equitable, and resilient communities. Across the US, many urban communities lack access to parks and quality open space. Yet almost 20 million people without park access, including kids and their families, live within a 10-minute walk of a public school. This session will explore the Trust for Public Land’s pioneering Community Schoolyards program and their efforts to leverage schoolyards for climate action and resilience. Providing context from the national program and using case studies from the Dallas Schoolyard Program, we discussed the implementation strategy, the collaborative planning process, design of the schoolyards, and wider implications for climate education and action, heat island reduction, and community resilience.

Speakers:
Danielle Denk is the Senior Director, Community Schoolyards® Initiative Director at Trust for Public Land where she works across the organization and with partners to advance the Community Schoolyard movement. In her eleven years at TPL, she directed and managed The Parks for People Program in Camden and Philadelphia, working directly with schools and communities to transform asphalt schoolyards into vibrant, healthy, climate-smart hubs. With over 25 years’ experience in public space design and community organizing, her career has been formed by the needs of the people – so that everyone has access to a high-quality public space.

Molly Morgan is the Parks for People Program Manager for the Trust for Public Land's North Texas office. Her research is focused on how social resiliency and the urban built environment are impacted by historic landscape architecture and planning mechanisms.  At the Trust for Public Land, Molly manages a number of projects including GIS-based city-wide planning initiative, a crowdsourced park quality assessment project, a watershed level master plan for parks and trails in Southern Dallas, the design and development of several park projects in Dallas, in addition to organizing the community engagement and participatory design that accompanies these projects.