Did you know? Prospect Park is home to Brooklyn’s only Lake, a 60-acre haven for numerous species of fish, birds, turtles, frogs and plants. The Lake also attracts plenty of human admirers, and this July, we hope you’ll join us in being a Park Champion as we celebrate Lake Appreciation Month.

Volunteer at the Lake
All July, Prospect Park Alliance has opportunities for you to lend a hand during Park Pitch In days! Join us for clean up projects on select Saturdays and Sundays—volunteers will be given grabbers, nets, and bags to help fish out trash from along the shoreline of our Lake. Appropriate for supervised youth ages 4-13, Teens and Adults. Sign up to volunteer.

Fish Responsibly
Fishing is permitted in the Prospect Park Lake, and we ask all who participate to be Park Champions and follow these simple rules:

• Fishing is strictly catch-and-release, and permissible in designated areas only. See our map for permitted fishing areas.
• To protect wildlife, no barbed hooks or lead fishing weights are allowed.
• Fishing line entangles birds and other wildlife, which can result in injury or death. Discard fishing line fragments and hooks responsibly in marked fishing line bins or trash cans.
• Anyone over the age of 16 needs a fishing license from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYS DEC).

Learn more on our Fishing page. 

Pledge to be a Park Champion
Prospect Park is essential to the health and wellbeing of millions of community members, and the hundreds of species of plants and wildlife that call Brooklyn’s Backyard home. Today, take an important step and pledge to Be A Park Champion, and enter to win great prizes.

Learn much more about being a Park Champion in Prospect Park.

Prospect Park is the place to be for our community, which is why Prospect Park Alliance, the non-profit that sustains Brooklyn’s Backyard, is continuing the Re:New Prospect Park initiative for a second year. These efforts help serve our community to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge of visitors in the park.

Due to the pandemic, Prospect Park Alliance lost critical funding which resulted in a reduced workforce and resources. This combined with an increase in park visitors led to the park getting much more love than it can handle. However, thanks to the support of our community of donors and volunteers over the past two years, the park has been able to weather the storm, and the Alliance is placing much-needed funds to continue our Re:New efforts in time for our busiest season.

“Prospect Park has been so important for all of us these last two years. Our community has supported the park as volunteers, donors and advocates, and enabled us to sustain this essential green oasis,” said Prospect Park Alliance Interim President James Snow. 

“During the pandemic, it was made abundantly clear just how vital parks are to the health and wellbeing of this city,” said NYC Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue. “As we continue to recover, our priority is to ensure that parks in all neighborhoods are clean, green and safe. We are so grateful for the support of our partners at the Prospect Park Alliance who share in our commitment through programs like the Re:New Initiative.”

Critical support for this initiative is made possible through generous funding from Amazon, and many generous individuals and community members who make annual contributions to the Alliance. Learn more about Prospect Park Alliance membership.

Re:New Prospect Park Initiatives

Park Maintenance
Prospect Park Alliance has partnered with ACE New York, a non-profit that empowers the homeless, to provide additional maintenance resources to help clean the park on peak weekdays and weekend evenings through October. In addition, the Alliance has brought on board four groundskeepers to help supplement NYC Parks maintenance crews during this busiest time of year. The crew is partially funded via a grant from Amazon.

“Prospect Park is a local gem offering healthy outdoor recreation to Brooklyn families,” said Carley Graham Garcia, Amazon’s Head of Community Affairs in New York. “This creative initiative offers new job opportunities, while ensuring Prospect Park continues to serve our local neighborhood especially as we head into the summer months. Amazon is thrilled to renew this partnership for Summer 2022.”

To support these efforts, Prospect Park Alliance is encouraging park visitors to carry out their trash via promotional signage at all park entrances. The Alliance has also installed large trash receptacles in key areas of the park.

Park Improvements
The Alliance will continue the re-investment in the park to tackle important improvement projects through funding from our community of donors. Work will take place to improve pedestrian pathways, repair stonework at the Lakeside esplanade and locations throughout the park, install new picnic tables at the Wellhouse barbecue area, and improve drainage throughout the park—an increasingly critical tool in improving the resilience of the park against major rain and flooding events.

In 2021, the Re:New initiative successfully brought improvements to every corner of the park. The Lincoln Road comfort station received a complete makeover, new barbecues, furnishings and fixtures were installed at the popular Picnic House and Bandshell barbecue areas, new benches were added to the beloved Drummer’s Grove, and broken ornamental brickwork at the historic Boathouse terrance was repaired.

Volunteer Opportunities
Prospect Park Alliance has brought back the popular Re:New Volunteer Corps—a weekly volunteer program that tackles park improvement projects made necessary by the high volume of visitors. The crew works alongside Alliance staff to maintain playgrounds, painting over unsightly graffiti, weed areas overgrown with invasive plants and repaint park benches and railings.

In 2021, the Re:New Volunteer Corps was a great success and the crew worked on a variety of park improvement projects. Over the course of the season, they removed 2.6 tons of invasive vines and weeds; filled 250 holes on the Long Meadow; replenished all playground sandboxes; and sanded and painted 270 linear feet of hand railing, 121 benches, 46 entrance bollards, and the 10 storage containers on Center Drive.

About Prospect Park Alliance
Prospect Park Alliance is the non-profit organization that sustains, restores and advances Prospect Park, Brooklyn’s Backyard, in partnership with the City of New York. The Alliance provides critical staff and resources that keep the Park green and vibrant for the diverse communities that call Brooklyn home. Learn more at prospectpark.org. 

About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About ACE
ACE was founded in 1992 and provides job-readiness training, work experience, all around support, and much more to New Yorkers who have histories of homelessness, incarceration and addiction. At ACE, men and women overcome barriers through hard work to reach their goals of full-time employment, economic self-sufficiency, and family reunification. Over 3,000 men and women have secured full-time employment through ACE’s programs. Learn more at acenewyork.org.

In a normal year, Prospect Park receives upwards of 10 million visits—folks flock to Brooklyn’s Backyard for picnics, play dates, concerts, dog walks and so much more. During the best of times, tidying up after these visits is an enormous undertaking, requiring the help of dozens of NYC Parks and Prospect Park Alliance staff and volunteers. This work helps ensure that the park stays clean and safe for our community and the wildlife that call Prospect Park home.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many changes to the park. With nearly everything other public space closed, parks have never been more essential for our community—or more visited. Across the city, parks are packed and trash is on the rise. As the Alliance deals with reduced staff in the park, and reduced revenue to pay for supplemental cleaning crews, we are looking to our community to help keep this shared space clean—and you are stepping up!

Want to join in the fight to keep Prospect Park clean and healthy? Here are our tips:

• An easy way to help keep the park clean? Carry your trash out of the park with you when you go or locate a park dumpster for trash to prevent overfilling smaller receptacles.
• Want to play a bigger part? Make your own Green-and-Go Kit by pulling together garbage bags, trash grabbers and gloves for your next trip to the park.
• If you are helping out, please observe social distancing guidelines—wear a face covering and keep 6 feet of distance from others.
• Stick to park paths to avoid trampling fragile park habitats, and thank you for doing your part for Brooklyn’s Backyard! 

Learn more about how you can help Prospect Park Alliance sustain the park environment. 

Images: above via Gail Greenberg, below left via Paula Zamora Gonzalez, below right via Pristine Johannessen

This year on Earth Day, April 22, Prospect Park Alliance piloted a Green + Go Kit volunteer program, which offered trash grabbers and garbage bags to ecologically minded Brooklynites. Forty kits were loaned to the public in an effort to create a socially distanced volunteer opportunity, and the response was more than enthusiastic: all kits were booked in just three days. 

“It was a very diverse group of people—all ages and cultures were represented, adults and families with children,” said Maria Carrasco, Vice President for Public Programs at Prospect Park Alliance. “People were very thankful that the Alliance was offering this opportunity, and they walked out the door and started cleaning up trash right away!”

The Green + Go Kit volunteers aren’t the only ones who have been helping with trash collection—the help regular park-goers who are doing their part has been reported far and wide: these community members have been going out of their way to help pick up litter to keep Brooklyn’s Backyard clean and beautiful.