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MetroParks fundraisers hear from Cuyahoga park group
WARREN
After hearing the advice of a fundraising group for another park system, Mill Creek MetroParks’ nonprofit organizations are discussing their own future efforts and whether those should be more closely coordinated.
Friends of Fellows Riverside Gardens – the group that supports the MetroParks’ botanical gardens – and the Mill Creek Park Foundation, along with invited MetroParks board and staff members, met privately Tuesday at the Raymond John Wean Foundation with a representative from Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park to learn how it bolstered its fundraising efforts over the past several years by consolidating its fundraising groups.
Friends and the park foundation have been in talks over the past few months about how they can work more closely together to avoid overlaps that now exist in their operations.
Representatives from both groups have not denied the possibility of a merger, but say it’s far from decided.
Several people who attended the presentation described it as helpful.
“A lot of the organizations they [Conservancy for Cuyahoga] had started with are very similar in size and mission to Friends and the foundation. They took some groups that had larger budgets; they took some groups that had smaller budgets, and each group had specific skills in addition to being different sizes. That’s kind of a good analogue of what we’re exploring at this point,” said Paul Hagman, president of Friends.
“As a whole, [there were] just a lot of good parallels and a lot of good information for us to be aware of as we continue the conversations,” he said. “ They looked at ways to combine efforts to make it work better, so the whole is more than the sum of the parts.”
“The presenter pointed out some of the hazards in trying to coordinate fundraising where multiple groups are involved,” said MetroParks board member Tom Shipka. “Although there are differences between Cuyahoga National Park and Mill Creek MetroParks, most of the points that she offered were applicable to the MetroParks.”
No action was taken at the meeting, which was described as strictly informational.
Friends and the park foundation will continue discussions.
“At this point, really, today’s meeting was just informational about how other groups have approached this same type of situation,” Hagman said. “Our next step is simply to look at how that model might apply to us, and begin to develop questions to ask ourselves, and decide what is going to be necessary if something like this is going to develop. At this point, we don’t know what we don’t know.
“This is very preliminary. If it’s something the boards want to continue to explore, I think it’s a minimum of months of conversations before taking any kind of recommendations to our members of Friends,” he said.