Bedding down for winter: Love Your Park returns to Philadelphia this weekend to beautify city parks and green spaces

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As the city prepares for winter and cooler temperatures, thousands of volunteers are expected to support Philadelphia’s more than 100 parks and green spaces in a massive fall clean-up during Love Your Park weekend.

The biannual event is a collaboration of the Fairmount Park Conservancy,  Philadelphia Parks and Recreation and numerous Park Friends networks that come together twice a year, in the spring and fall, to help beautify and clean up the city parks.

“We are bedding the parks down for winter,” said Kevin Roche, chief of staff at Fairmount Park Conservancy. “A lot of raking leaves and doing some tree planting. We have over 100 trees that are going to go in based on Park friends network requests.”

There are 106 Friends groups in Philadelphia, hosting a total of 110 service days across the city from Friday, Nov. 8 to Sunday, Nov. 11, according to Elisa Ruse-Esposito, parks stewardship administrator for Philadelphia Parks and Recreation.

“We encourage volunteers to sign up, find your local neighborhood park or check out a park,” she said. “Maybe you’ve never been before and always wanted to check out [and] support their cleanup. Maybe get to know those Friends groups and see when their next event or meeting is and get involved.”

For many people in the Parks Friends groups, the Love Your Park weekend means more than just cleaning up their neighborhood park.

“It fills my heart, it really does. I enjoy being outside,” said Cheri Harrison, president of Friends of Carroll Park, which cares for the West Philadelphia park. She’s coordinating her park’s service day Saturday.

Harrison said she began going to community meetings a few years ago and slowly got more involved in leadership, even advocating for a new swing set.

“Somehow I got forced to the front,” she joked.

For her, Love Your Park is about giving back to her community.

“I get excited by seeing a little girl sitting over there on the swing. Or when you get neighbors who are not necessarily going to come and help, but they say, ‘We see, we see what you’ve done.’ It is truly a labor of love,” she said.

Parks Friends networks will host their service days from Friday through Sunday, with many open volunteer spots still needing to be filled.

“We’re just trying to drive as many volunteers as possible. Some groups struggle with getting volunteers to their parks, and other groups, it’s not as big of an issue,” said Ruse-Esposito.

Volunteers can come during any availability they may have.

“We try to make it so that you can do a little or a lot,” Harrison said. “If you have 15 minutes, if you have 30 minutes, if you have three hours, we’ll take it all.”

This Love Your Park weekend comes during a noticeably warmer fall and in the middle of a drought that has impacted the Delaware Valley for over a month. Many trees have not lost all their leaves, but leaf raking and collection will still go forward.

“The leaves all get picked up and they get brought back to the Fairmount Park Organic Recycling Center and then turned into compost that we use in our park system,” Ruse-Esposito said. “Residents of Philadelphia can come get some compost for free for their gardens.”

Interested volunteers can go to Love Your Park’s website to find a service day event anywhere in the city. The event organizers will provide the necessary supplies to help with the cleanup of each Friends park group.