Park Pride Day will be taking a year off in 2023. The event will be relaunched in 2024 with some exciting new changes to make it more impactful for our parks and our community.

These changes for 2024 will include:

– Shifting from planting annuals to planting perennials
– Reducing the total number of Park Pride Day sites
– Focusing on total park cleanups at some of our larger community parks
– Sign bed conversions to turf for easier maintenance
– Soft-launching our Streamwood Litter League program

Over the past 12 years, Park Pride Day has grown into a massive event. In 2022, we hosted individual park cleanups at nearly all of our 47 parks. While that is an outstanding achievement, with our current staffing situation we will severely overextend our staff and our budget if we continue to follow that model. By reducing the number of Park Pride Day sites, we will still be able to host a great community volunteer event. As 2024 will focus on getting our larger community parks entirely cleaned up to start the spring and since spring is the Parks Department’s busiest time of the year, this will enable us to better maintain our larger community parks and dedicate more staff time toward our smaller, neighborhood parks.

We hope this revamped version of Park Pride Day will continue to be popular with our longtime volunteers while hopefully attracting new volunteers and partners as well.