Campaign Priorities

Creating Healthy Infrastructure

The Fair Play Campaign advances park infrastructure ranging from playgrounds, trails, and athletic fields to wetlands, creeks, and meadows. Together, these improvements are vital to Philadelphia’s public health, economic well-being and environmental sustainability. And, simply put, they make our parks a fun place to visit and explore.

  • Fairmount Park is one of the most recognizable and beloved landscapes in Philadelphia, and the birthplace of our city’s public parks system. West Fairmount Park boasts an incredible array of scenic natural landscapes, historic sites, and cultural significance. The Fair Play Campaign is investing in projects that will raise this park’s profile by highlighting its unique story and assets, and advance equity through improved connections between the park and its surrounding neighborhoods. In 2024, the Conservancy hosted 88 public programs with over 9,600 attendees.

    With the Centennial Gateway and Welsh Fountain Gardens, the Conservancy is reintroducing a historic gateway into the park and creating a vibrant and welcoming public space.

    This project is the transformation of ten significant acres at the heart of the Centennial District, once home to the 1876 Centennial Exhibition and World Fair. The Centennial Gateway will feature welcoming paths and enhanced landscaping alongside critical traffic calming measures, inviting neighbors and visitors into the Welsh Fountain Gardens where they will experience the fully restored 1887 Welsh Fountain and its surrounding gardens. Areas of play and exploration will be balanced by contemplative places and engaging artwork. The Fair Play campaign has funded a portion of the Centennial Gateway closest to the Parkside neighborhood and is raising a significant portion of the remaining funds to enable the Welsh Fountain Gardens to break ground in the fall of 2026.

    West Fairmount Park is also home to the Center for Parks at Ohio House. The Conservancy’s headquarters is a significant adaptive reuse project that won a 2025 Preservation Achievement Award, and the Fair Play Campaign has helped to bring new life to the historic 1876 Ohio House establishing it as a hub of park activity.

    In addition to capital improvements, the Conservancy provides expert land care for the forest, trails and meadows located in this section of the park. This ongoing work to steward our park land is supported by the Fair Play Campaign.

  • FDR Park is Philadelphia’s only Olmsted Park and the only estuary park within the Philadelphia Parks & Recreation system. The Fair Play Campaign is advancing the FDR Park Plan, which is the largest environmental restoration project underway on park land and is transforming this 348-acre park with a variety of new and restored amenities. From the Gateway Plaza at Pattison Avenue and Broad Street to the award-winning Anna C. Verna Playground to acres of newly created wetland, FDR Park is poised to be one of the most climate resilient and accessible parks in Philadelphia. Support of the Fair Play Campaign will continue to fund environmental restoration and new park amenities. In 2024, the Conservancy hosted 33 public programs in FDR Park with over 7,675 attendees.

    –

    The Anna C. Verna Playground offers children and families a joyful experience that is also uniquely suited to FDR Park, merging activity and play with nature and water. The 2-acre all-ages playground on the banks of Pattison Lagoon features an extraordinary 20-swing structure – the largest swing set in North America! – and custom-designed “birdhouse” structures with slides and climbing areas that acknowledge FDR Park’s role as a premier bird habitat. Completed in Fall 2023, the playground has already earned accolades for its citywide popularity and landscape design.

    –

    The Gateway Plaza, completed in Spring 2025, reinvents the main entrance of FDR Park with an eye-catching, 6-foot-tall “FDR” sign and a pedestrian entryway that connects the park to the Broad Street Line, bus routes, and an adjoining bike path. The Gateway Plaza is designed to be the welcome mat for FDR Park and a destination in its own right, serving as a meeting point and entryway for park visitors. Custom benches, groves of native trees, water misters, and a flowering understory welcome visitors, and the plaza’s design has seamlessly incorporated infrastructure to address stormwater management needs with rain gardens and plant beds.

    –

    The Welcome Center, also completed in spring 2025, has reimagined and renovated the park’s former guardhouse and stables into the park’s first-ever welcome center. The new Welcome Center is LEED Gold certified and features public restrooms, an open-air courtyard for refreshments and events, community meeting spaces, park offices, and an information center, bringing these important amenities – for the first time – to this 348-acre park that draws more than 4 million annual visitors. The Welcome Center has the potential to set a new standard for what Philadelphia parks can be and how we can sustain them for generations to come.

    –

    The Nature Phase is a 130+ acre effort to re-establish resilient, native natural habitats in the western half of FDR Park. This ecological effort - one of the largest in the City - will restore wetland, forest, and riparian (riverbank) areas of the park, which were disrupted in the 20th century by the construction of a golf course which has since closed. Reintroducing natural habitat with native vegetation to Philadelphia’s only estuarial city park will benefit residents and local wildlife, and enhance the park’s longevity in the face of climate change. Incredible progress has already been made with the construction of a 33-acre tidal wetland, made possible by the PHL Airport. The Fair Play Campaign will support restoration of the park’s Shedbrook Creek to accommodate boating activities, and allow park visitors to explore stunning habitats.

    –

    The Picnic & Play project will fulfill community requests for more publicly accessible athletic facilities and address the citywide field shortage impacting children and teens in the city. This project includes multisport fields, play areas, picnic groves, and - for the first time in FDR - basketball courts. Picnic & Play and the Nature Phase will together remove the historic segregation of nature and youth sports by creating high-quality recreational spaces alongside resilient native habitats in the same public park. The project will dramatically expand recreation opportunities for 21,000 kids living in South Philadelphia, as well as youth and families citywide, while simultaneously increasing mental, physical, and social health benefits as well as opportunities for youth advancement.

Growing Critical Programs

People are at the heart of everything we do. Through our programs, we support positive health outcomes and connection with our parks, while building engaged park advocates and volunteers. The Fair Play Campaign is helping to sustain and grow programs such as Love Your Park and our volunteer program, which allows individuals and companies to give back and experience a deeper connection with our parks.

  • In Philadelphia, we are fortunate that so many local volunteers work with the Conservancy and City to maintain and activate neighborhood parks. There are over 140 registered Park Friends Groups across the city, who provide critical maintenance and advocacy support for parks and cultivate community in their neighborhoods. The Conservancy’s stewardship and volunteer management staff work year-round to support and celebrate Park Friends through program funding, workshops, event promotion, and more.

    The twice-annual highlight of this partnership is Love Your Park. During Love Your Park Week in the spring and Love Your Park Weekend in the fall, Park Friends groups organize over 100 volunteer projects throughout the city to ready the parks for the coming season. Since 2021, 11,368 volunteers have participated in Love Your Park events - fulfilling a critical need for neighborhood parks. The Fair Play Campaign supports Love Your Park, channeling Philadelphia’s incredible civic spirit into the parks that shape our neighborhoods and improve our daily lives.

  • We Walk PHL is so much more than a walk in the park. The program, a partnership with the City of Philadelphia’s Public Health Department, Department of Parks and Recreation and the Conservancy, is a network of free weekly walking groups, co-led by local volunteers, at public parks throughout Philadelphia. We Walk PHL seeks to promote health outcomes, increase use of Philadelphia’s parks, and create opportunities for people to pursue fitness goals while meeting their neighbors. Since 2021, the program has expanded from 14 to 29 park locations across the city, where guided walks are led by community-recruited, volunteer leaders who receive training from program staff. In surveys, 91% of walkers reported improved mental health, 87% reported improved physical health, and 86% reported forming relationships in the program that lasted beyond We Walk PHL. We Walk PHL often serves as an entry point for residents to become more engaged with their local parks, and has formed a citywide community of enthusiastic walkers who share a Facebook group and will “park hop” to other neighborhoods to meet each other and go for a stroll.

  • Volunteers allow us to have a greater impact on improving our parks as we work alongside individuals and corporate groups in maintaining key landscapes, through activities such as restoring trails, installing plantings and removing invasive species. There are a variety of ways to get involved, from open volunteer days where individuals can participate in one event or join us each month, to our Corporate Stewardship Program, which offers customizable, hands-on experiences for corporate groups, to our Volunteer Leadership program, which takes passionate and engaged park champions and gives them additional opportunities and training to become leaders and advocates for our public spaces. Since 2021, our volunteer participants have more than tripled from 300 to 1,129.

Preparing for the Future

Fairmount Park Conservancy is committed to building healthy financial reserves for the future of Philadelphia’s parks, as we deliver on our near-term initiatives and continue long-term planning across capital and programmatic areas.

Fairmount Park Conservancy has been the non-profit champion for Philadelphia’s parks since 1997. We are also one of the few conservancies in the nation that works across an entire park system, allowing us to focus on different parks throughout our city where our public-private partnership with the City can result in the most investment into our parks.

In Philadelphia, 13% of our city is park land, with 95% of Philadelphians living within a 10-minute walk of a park. Unfortunately, only 1.2% of our city budget is allocated to our parks, which is equal to the city spending $112 per person on its park system. This is well below the national average of $133. This is both a significant challenge and an opportunity, as the Conservancy is working to close this gap, so that more Philadelphians can benefit from a well resourced park system.