Connections 2025: California Park & Recreation Society Conference & Expo
The California Parks & Recreation Society Conference & Expo will provide the latest information and services for the park, recreation and leisure services profession.
CCLR will be participating at the conference as an presenters on Thursday, March 20th. Make sure to connect with Sarah Fingerhood and attend her panel in collaboration with the Trust for Public Land and WRT: Making Old Parks New Again: Reversing Historic Disinvestment from Advocacy to Funding!
Making Old Parks New Again: Reversing Historic Disinvestment from Advocacy to Funding | March 20, 4:00 p.m. PT
Parks are critical for our communities, but 100 million people (including 28 million kids) don’t have access to a park within a 10-minute walk of home. Cities struggle to maintain older parks, as property tax base grows thinner and needs escalate. Who’s affected? Most often, the people who can benefit most from what good parks offer: health, well-being, air quality, social cohesion.
This session puts the spotlight on an emerging success story, with lessons applicable to your community. Fresno’s story of rapid growth, decline, wealth disparity, and chronic inequity is replicated across the state and nation. Recent actions by community leaders have built coalitions to correct decades of neglect. This session chronicles the comeback of parks and recreation in Fresno. Once relegated to last place nationally in the Trust for Public Land’s ParkScore index, the City completed a park system master plan that documented the poor condition of parks and critical lack of funding, and then passed a major tax initiative to fund parks and address equity.
The panel consists of people in the trenches of the process who can speak to the strategies used, technical uses of data and mapping, how obstacles were overcome, and lessons learned.
Senior Director, Strategy & Innovation | The Trust for Public Land (TPL)
Linda is responsible for developing long-term strategy and direction for the Land and People Lab at Trust for Public Land, providing high-level leadership and anticipating trends in the broader parks, conservation, equity, and technology spaces. She leads the exploration and implementation of data and analysis opportunities to accelerate the national movement for parks and public land, and previously worked with all of TPL’s field offices to develop state-focused five-year strategic plans. Prior to this, Linda was a partner at a start-up that developed customized decision-support tools that quantify ecosystem services for clients such as The Nature Conservancy, The Dow Chemical Company, and Environmental Defense Fund. She was also at Business for Social Responsibility, where she built and led advisory services on corporate water strategy and ecosystem services strategies for Fortune 500 companies. Linda has a BA in Environmental Economics from the University of Michigan, an MPhil in Development Studies and Social Transformation from the University of Cape Town, and an MBA from the University of Michigan.
WRT | ASLA, LEED AP | Principal / Landscape Architect / Urban Designer
John Gibbs, a principal at WRT, is a landscape architect and urban designer whose practice is anchored in the social and ecological processes of our cities and natural areas. His portfolio of planning and design assignments spans urban parks, natural open spaces, waterfronts, trails, streets, districts, educational campuses, and city-/region-wide park systems. Leveraging the McHargian roots of the firm, John’s recent work advances design with nature in the context of climate change. He has led resilience and adaptation projects in California and nationally. Community engagement is fundamental to all facets of his work and his outreach skills are valued by clients and communities who seek positive outcomes rooted in productive public dialogue. John serves on the board of the Greenbelt Alliance and was a research advisor for Resilient by Design – a regional effort across the San Francisco Bay Area.
Center for Creative Land Recycling | Senior Program Associate
As a Senior Program Associate, Sarah Fingerhood assists CCLR in environmental justice research, community outreach and engagement, and general development of our organization, partnerships, and programs. Sarah recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Communications, Activism, and Advocacy. Her independent study and thesis critically evaluated Web3 and drew on larger theories around how digital design, infrastructure, and governance systems reproduce and amplify existing inequality. Following this, Sarah returned home to the Bay Area and completed a certificate in Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley’s Environmental School of Design, where she honed in her passion to design systems that promote cohesive environmental and social health, resilience, and sustainability for all community members, human and nonhuman alike. Before coming to CCLR, Sarah was a Design, Planning, and Architecture intern for the San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department where she mainly worked on groundbreaking equitable park development plans.
