Adopting Centennial Park

As it turns out. Adopting a park is beyond easy. 

I had it built up in my mind that this would be a multiple meeting thing, and that I’d have to get involved in bureaucratic conversations and yadda yadda. Basically I thought you had to be some kind of statesman or a real Business with profits and losses. 

Nope. Not at all. 

The program itself is called adopt-a-spot, at least where I am in Colorado, but it’s usually the same name across most states. Anyways the program identifies 2 types of “spots” up for adoption. You can adopt a local garden, a small plot ready for planting, and help add some visual flair to the parks in your area. The second type of “spot” is the park itself. 

For the park, they only ask that you make the commitment of at least 1 visit per month  into the following calendar year, which ends in April. So for instance I adopted Centennial Park, and I’ll be responsible for helping clean up debris on a monthly basis until about April 2026. This is all very cool stuff, but I was really blown away with the timeframe of it all. 

Like I said, in my mind this was going to be Mr. Lucas’ big day at city hall or something. 

Nope. 

It took a week, maybe 2 emails, a phone call, an online application, and a signed waiver to be scanned. And most of that was done across 2 days. I was able to meet up with a City Official and accept the responsibilities of adopting the park. On top of that, I got a little look behind the scenes as to what projects the City has planned for the park. They even donated enough materials to bring others into the field and possibly make this a team effort, they doubled the amount of grabbers I had already bought, handed over about 8 pair of really nice rubberized work gloves, and a decent roll of contractors bags. 

By the end of the day: I met with the city, adopted the park, made our 3rd cleanup, worked with Parks and Wildlife to get eyes on the beaver activity, and already are seeing improvements to ground coverage, and large wooden debris (LWD) in the water. 

It sounds cheesy but I’ve already been able to see what kind of impact I can make on a local ecosystem. And it’s got me thinking that it has to be easier to get more people involved. 

So maybe it’s time I try doing that.