For Park Pride, equity is not a dirty word. Quite the opposite.
With backing from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation and several other major foundations, Park Pride has been doubling down on making grants in Atlanta’s historically disinvested communities.
Park Pride, founded the same year as the Piedmont Park Conservancy, celebrated its 35th anniversary last year.
Over the years, Park Pride has evolved to be the conservancy for all the city’s parks that are not part of a conservancy.
“We were created to support all the other parks,” said Michael Halicki, president and CEO of Park Pride. “We are kind of like the United Way for parks.”
The Woodruff Foundation was an early believer.
In 2007, the Woodruff Foundation made a $500,000 two-year award to Park Pride so the nonprofit could make grants to the city’s community parks. The grant program built upon a 2005 donation from the Dean Day Smith Foundation, where neighborhood parks could receive $500 if the community matched those dollars.
“The Woodruff Foundation encouraged us to do larger grants so we could have a greater impact,” said Halicki, who began leading the organization in 2013. George Dusenbury was Park Pride’s executive director when the Woodruff Foundation first began investing in the organization.
The Woodruff Foundation has continued to increase its investment in Park Pride since 2007, culminating with its largest grant to the organization so far — $4 million for the 2025-2026 cycle, up from $3.4 million for the 2023-2024 timeframe.
“Since the Woodruff Foundation first provided support for the Legacy Grants program almost 20 years ago, Park Pride has deployed those funds to help improve almost half of the City’s parks,” Erik Johnson, president of the Woodruff Foundation, wrote in an email.
Over the years, the Woodruff Foundation has invested nearly $16.5 million in the organization and its grant-making program. Park Pride has funded 195 projects in 104 parks, leveraging an estimated $50.6 million in community green spaces.
“We respect the way in which Park Pride works with neighborhoods to develop park improvement plans that genuinely reflect community goals and ideas,” Johnson continued. “Replacing a playground or making general capital improvements can be expensive, time-consuming work, no matter the size of the park.”
In 2020, during the early days of the COVID pandemic, after the murder of George Floyd, Park Pride began taking a more serious look at how its grants were being invested.
Park Pride had required communities to match the grant dollars that were being made in their neighborhood parks. But that policy tended to benefit communities that had the financial resources or connections to make that match – often leaving other, less affluent areas behind.
The nonprofit then decided to remove the matching requirement in historically disinvested communities. It launched its “Parks for All” campaign to help increase funding in the neighborhoods that often had the greatest need to improve their green spaces.
“After we removed the matching requirement, we had a dozen friends’ groups that applied for grants with us for the first time,” Halicki said. “We had $1 million more in requests than the dollars we had to support parks. That was the motivation for the Parks for All campaign. We found we had much greater need than we had realized before.”
The “Parks for All” campaign raised $12.8 million, including a lead $3 million gift from the Woodruff Foundation, $2 million from the City of Atlanta and $1 million from the Home Depot Foundation.
Other major contributors to Park Pride have included the Truist Foundation, the Georgia Power Foundation and the Coca-Cola Foundation as well as several family foundations.
Park Pride makes awards to community parks every year. Most of its grants are between $50,000 and $250,000, with the vast majority of them under $100,000.
While several entities have been shying away from using the word “equity” or “diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI),” Park Pride is standing solidly behind the concept.
“Councilmember Jason Winston said it best: ‘DEI is in Atlanta’s DNA,’” Halicki said. “Atlanta is a beacon for equity. It defines who we are.”
Park Pride determines historically disinvested communities from the census. It includes parks within a 10-minute walk of census tracts where more than 50 percent of the residences are at or below 60 percent of the Area Median Income or where at least 25 percent of the residences are below the poverty level.
It’s a policy embraced by the Woodruff Foundation.
“We appreciate that Park Pride thoughtfully prioritizes helping neighborhoods that may have a harder time raising private dollars,” Johnson said.
“The Woodruff Foundation has always understood the value of not just what we do, but how we do it,” Halicki said. “Woodruff has been very supportive of us making changes to the program so we can meet communities where they are at.”
Park Pride has also started a grant program to design park improvements in historically disinvested communities. The Phase 1 grant helps Friends of Park groups identify their needs so they can later apply for grants to implement those improvements.
It now has three landscape architects on staff to work with “Friends” groups on designing ways to enhance their parks.
Since Halicki has been at the helm, Park Pride’s staff has grown from nine people to 19. In 2013, Park Pride’s operating budget was $786,000, and it is now $2.9 million.
As a result, Atlanta’s national “Park Score” ranking has improved from 51st in 2016 to 21st in 2025, according to the Trust for Public Land’s national ranking among the top 100 cities in the country.
For Halicki, it’s all about building stronger communities by investing in our city’s green spaces.
“We build community as we help build and improve parks,” Halicki said. “Our mission is to engage communities to activate the power of parks.”
Thanks for all the good work that Park Pride does and your great reporting!