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Park foundations plan merger to create conservancy
By Sarah Lehr
YOUNGSTOWN
Two charitable organizations that support Mill Creek MetroParks are looking to merge and create a conservancy.
The Mill Creek Park Foundation and Friends of Fellows Riverside Gardens plan to form the Volney Rogers Conservancy.
The Mill Creek Park Foundation supports the entire park system, while Friends of Fellows Riverside Gardens focuses only on the park’s gardens.
The proposed conservancy would operate as a public-private partnership. The organization’s name would pay tribute to Volney Rogers, a Youngstown lawyer who secured land for Mill Creek Park at the end of the 19th century.
The conservancy would follow the example of a conservancy created for Cuyahoga Valley National Park in the Cleveland-Akron area. Benefits of the conservancy model include the ability to leverage economies of scale and eliminate redundancies presented by multiple smaller organizations.
Friends leaders said financial headwinds make the conservancy seem like an increasingly attractive option.
“We can continue to manage decline or we can move forward in a creative way,” said Friends President Paul Hagman,
The number of people paying Friends membership fees dipped to 600 at the start of this year from a record-high of 1,000 in 2015, according to a handout distributed by the group.
“People haven’t abandoned the park,” said Friends board member Janet Yaniglos. “Their faith in institutions might be profoundly shaken, but not their sense of connection to this land.”
The Mill Creek MetroParks district came under criticism after the 2015 decision of Executive Director Aaron Young to fire multiple longtime park employees, as part of a cost-savings and reorganization plan.
To create the conservancy, Mill Creek MetroParks, the Mill Creek Park Foundation and Friends of Fellows Riverside Gardens will need to adopt a memorandum of understanding.
It appears, so far, that all three entities are supportive of the plan.
“It became very obvious that this was the right thing to do,” said Jamie Jamison, a Foundation board member and a member of a cross-organization task force that studied the merger. “We all love the park. We all love different parts of the park.”
Hagman anticipates the conservancy would begin operating by the end of this year. Conservancy members would elect a board to govern the new organization.