Being a Member of Friends of Florida State Parks is so much more than visiting our wonderful parks.

If you are a member of Friends of Florida State Parks – thank you so much and please renew your membership. If you are not already a member but thinking about it, I hope the following will help persuade you why it is such a worthwhile cause.

As a member you do, of course, get free day passes to our award winning parks and trails. You can enjoy walking, hiking, swimming, birding, picnicking, canoeing and a host of other great outdoor activities. As you walk around the parks, however, look at how much work constantly needs to be done from building repairs and new construction, from trail clearance and better signage and from providing better interpretive and educational programs to increasing accessibility for all.

I would like to focus on these last two items but before that I want to once again thank our army of 27,000 statewide volunteers who help keep the parks open. It is their dedication and commitment that got Florida’s state parks voted the best in the nation – not just once but a record three times. Our army of park volunteers last year contributed more than 1.4 million hours of service, the equivalent of an additional 666 full time rangers.

One of the great pleasures of being a volunteer is to be able to present educational and environmental programs, especially to schoolchildren. Friends of Florida State Parks has set itself the goal of dramatically increasing the number of schoolchildren who have access to all our parks in the coming months and years.

We hope this will be achieved by a new Friends statewide program called ‘Education in the Parks’. After all, our parks provide the perfect outdoor classrooms.  We have already held a multi-agency group with potential partners to discuss the program and work is now underway to see how best to implement it.

The object is to have a portfolio of curriculum-acceptable programs that could be taught in the parks. For instance, math students could use parks to measure the circumference of a tree or the angle of a branch and science students could do water testing and other hands-on practical experiments.

Developing the program and providing the resources to administer and manage it will take considerable time, money and expertise – but it is a program that keep reap huge dividends by providing a different, more experiential learning experience.

One of the ways Friends of Florida State Parks has supported education in the park projects in the past was with our Yellow Buses in the Parks Project.  Wherever possible, we have made grants available to CSO groups who then pay the bus transportation costs.  Most, if not all, school districts in Florida have had to cut field trip transportation costs from their budgets.  Had not the CSO’s stepped in with financial help many, many children would not have the benefit of an educational experience in the parks. We are committed to further developing this activity and are vigorously pursuing funding sources from Foundations and other grant providers to help us grow this program. This is another example of how some of your membership fees are spent.

Finally, our parks provide such a wonderful opportunity to experience the great outdoors that they really should be accessible to everyone. That is why we want to increase our efforts to raise funds for our Access for All Campaign.  We have already helped purchase three Nomad all-terrain power wheelchairs and hope to buy many more. The wheelchairs, which cost $7,500, allow people with mobility challenges to explore places in the parks, like remote, unpaved trails that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to visit.

Another way of increasing accessibility is to provide parks with special mats that can be rolled out over sand or muddy areas so that wheelchairs can travel over them. Several parks, for instance, have used these mats so that people in wheelchairs can now access the beach. Also, Friends of Florida State Parks has provided funding to have captioning put on existing films that play in the parks’ visitor/education centers so that people with hearing loss can enjoy and learn along with other park visitors. 

Of course, all these improvements and purchases cost money but I hope you agree, that it is money well worth spending. So the next time you visit your favorite park, think of the many ways your membership fees are helping so many other people as well. Thank you.