Every five years, the State of California produces a new Statewide Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan (SCORP) to document what Californians need and want in outdoor recreation, and how the state can meet those needs. The 2021-2025 SCORP, approved by Governor Newsom in June 2021, is the second plan developed by the Office of Grants and Local Services (OGALS) within the State Department of Parks and Recreation. Over several years, we worked closely with OGALS to transform their vision for equitable park design, and equitable park funding, into a robust data-supported website (parksforcalifornia.org) and a set of three reports that cover overall recreation needs, participatory park design, and the evolving data landscape for documenting park need using publicly available data.
We developed a set of three reports, designed both as printable PDFs and as mobile-responsive scrolling pages on ParksforCalifornia.org. One report provides an overview of the entire recreation plan, setting a vision for the future where every Californian has easy access to outdoor recreation and natural landscapes. A second delves deeply into OGALS's decades of work fostering community-based park planning across hundreds of communities. This report includes extensive examples and testimonials from many successful projects, showing how the direct involvement of community members in park planning results in better outcomes and more beautiful, useful parks. The third report, where GreenInfo served as lead authors, lays out the history of how we developed the nation's best protected lands data (the California Protected Areas Database or CPAD), with state support, just as the U.S. Census was providing ever more accessible and useful demographic data. As park data became more complete and demographics more accessible, we were able to use emerging web technologies to provide universal, easy, and equal access to detailed reporting that once required specialized skills to produce. Alongside OGALS's proven community-based design methods, GreenInfo's data tools provide the foundation for more equitable park funding decisions.
Focus: Recreation,
Social Justice/Equity
Services: Interactive Solutions, GIS Services, Communications, Graphic Design, Publications, Analysis, Data, Maps, Applications Development, Web Mapping, Website Design
Project Years: 2018-2021
