America’s national parks have come a long way since Congress created the first one — Yellowstone — in 1872. It was not until 1916 that Woodrow Wilson signed the “Organic Act” to make the National Park Service (NPS) a bureau in the U.S. Department of the Interior. It was charged with preserving and maintaining the 35 parks and monuments at the time.
The agency now has a budget of more than $3.3 billion and 20,000 employees overseeing 431 parks spanning 85 million acres. Garden & Health has covered many of these in a state-by-state overview.
Meanwhile, the National Park Foundation (NPF) was chartered by Congress in 1967 as the official nonprofit partner of NPS. This move came about thanks to the support of the likes of Lady Bird Johnson, former first lady and wife of President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Laurance Rockefeller, businessman, philanthropist, and descendant of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller. It is in charge of directing charitable donations across national park sites in the form of grants and programmatic support.
In its first decade, NPF purchased land to preserve the likes of Gettysburg and the Muir Woods and contributed funding toward the protection of President Theodore Roosevelt’s home at the Sagamore Hill National Historic Site and the Lyndon Johnson Memorial Grove in Lady Bird Johnson Park. Last year, it guided $115 million toward multiple parks initiatives, including:
- Landscape and wildlife conservation projects;
- Resilience and sustainability initiatives;
- Stewardship in local communities;
- Education for young people;
- Creation of more inclusive outdoor exploration; and
- Engagement with the perspectives and histories of the various communities that have inhabited these lands.
Photo Courtesy NPS
This August, NPF announced that it had received a $100 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., a private foundation established in 1937 by J.K. Lilly, Sr., the founder of pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Company, and his sons.
“Our founders were inspired by the beauty and wonders of the natural world and supportive of research and educational programs about archaeology and the cultural history of our nation,” N. Clay Robbins, chairman and CEO of Lilly Endowment, noted in the press release.
The grant is the biggest ever received by NPF and directed toward the country’s national parks. Specifically, it will go toward The Campaign for National Parks, NPF’s initiative to raise $1 billion by 2028 in collaboration with NPS and park partners.
More than 400 such partners, such as Friends of Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park and the Ice Age Trail Alliance, aim to raise an additional $3.5 billion at that same time. Between Oct. 1, 2018, and Aug. 26, 2024, the Campaign for National Parks has raised 81% of its target goal at more than $815 million.
Photo Courtesy Friends of Hawai`i Volcanoes National Park/Janice Wei
This funding will combat climate threats to protected lands and collect support for the long-term survival and success of National Parks, speeding up and scaling NPF’s possible impact. Specifically, the funding will be used to invest in four priority categories.
Next Generation Of Park Stewards
First, it will be used to inspire the next generation of park stewards. According to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, children ages 8 through 12 spend four to six hours using screens, with teenagers spending up to nine hours. NPF wants to introduce young people to the parks to benefit mentally and physically, develop a love for the natural world, and learn about the country’s vibrant history.
The Open OutDoors for Kids program focuses on youth engagement and education. It uses virtual classroom activities and in-person field trips to help students explore the parks.
Since 2011, the program has impacted more than 2 million fourth-grade children. This year, over $4.4 million in grants supported the program’s 99 projects.
This year, 15,000 students from around Miami learned about biodiverse life at Everglades National Park and Biscayne National Park, and students from the San Francisco Bay Area observed northern elephant seals and gray whales at Point Reyes National Seashore. Others learned about the history of Chicago’s labor unions at Pullman National National Historical Park or about the culture of the local Anishinaabe Tribe at the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
Photo Courtesy U.S. National Park Service
NPF also emphasizes communities and workforce programming. The Service Corps, for example, enables young adults to work with a team at a national park site on priority projects, ranging from building trails to restoring habitats. For instance, NPF supported the Northwest Youth Corps’ Sound to Summit program last year. It brought 50 teenagers living in cities like Tacoma and Olympia, Washington, to the Puget Sound and Mount Rainier. There, they acquired conservation skills like planting native seeds and removing invasive vegetation.
Photo Courtesy Northwest Youth Corps
Conservation And Preservation
Second, the new funding will help conserve land and wildlife threatened by the climate or by humans themselves. NPF works with partners to restore wetlands, improve coastal resiliency, preserve trees, embrace nature-based climate solutions, and improve the connectivity of landscapes and waterways. In 2022, NPF removed 3,737 acres of invasive plant species that threatened native habitats.
For example, it has supported the removal of invasive fountain grass from three important streams in Saguaro National Park, which were once crowded with lowland leopard frogs, using 3,300 volunteer hours spanning three years. Frogs raised in backyard ponds in collaboration with partners like the Arizona Game and Fish Department will be reintroduced later this year.
Photo Courtesy NPS
NPF also works to conduct wildlife research to expand our understanding of threats, protect at-risk species, particularly those that are federally endangered or threatened, and promote thriving, healthy populations of native species. In 2022, NPF contributed to conservation efforts for 34 species, including the California Condor and elkhorn coral.
When funding for the 6 million acres of Denali National Park & Preserve decreased in the face of a global pandemic in 2020, the research being conducted on the predator-prey relationship between wolves and caribou there by NPS biologists was put at risk. NPF stepped in with funding, allowing one of the longest-running wildlife monitoring programs to continue. In 2022, it traced the species across 2 million acres using trail cams, GPS collars, and aerial monitoring.
Photo Courtesy U.S. National Park Service
Supporting science and research is essential to NPF’s work since the national parks serve as “living laboratories” practically untouched by humans. The NPF Science Fellowships, or Scientists in Parks Postdoctoral Fellowships, offer unique opportunities to provide insightful feedback on some of the parks’ most pressing issues. Some of these include figuring out why 70 Alaskan clearwater streams have turned orange and how to monitor and respond to manage the sagebrush steppe biome ecosystem in western parks.
Visitor Experience
Third, the Lilly Endowment’s donation will contribute toward ensuring a world-class visitor experience. With more than 300 million visitors annually, expected to rise to 500 million by 2040, it is more important than ever to create incredible memories while safeguarding parks from any negative impact by crowds.
Technology is being used to provide digital experiences to guests and connect staff to real-time data and analytics to create the parks of the future.
Changes are being implemented to make the parks more resilient and sustainable by reducing energy and water use and eliminating waste. Zion National Park, located in Utah, is a prime example. With the help of a $500,000 NPF grant and a $33 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, the park recently debuted a new fleet of battery-electric buses, replacing its entire former propane-powered fleet originally launched back in 2000.
Photo Courtesy NPS/Abi Farish
A renewed visitor experience depends on upgraded visitor centers and campgrounds. One of the biggest recent announcements is a $69 million investment, with $43 million from NPF, to add 15,000 square feet of museum exhibit space under the Lincoln Memorial in the undercroft. The public-private partnership project will feature immersive multimedia presentations focused on how the monument was built and its relationship to the Civil Rights movement.
By supporting NPS employees, NPF also seeks to foster the workforce of the future. Park rangers and staff are vital to protecting natural and cultural sites and assisting visitors, but they need nearby, affordable housing to do so. While there are more than 5,600 employee housing facilities spanning more than 200 parks, NPF estimates 200 new units are needed at Acadia, Grand Teton, and Yosemite alone. Therefore, in February, NPF and NPS announced a $40 million gift for more than 70 new modular employee housing units at Yellowstone National Park.
“These skilled, dedicated professionals at the National Park Service who protect our parks and make visitors’ experiences great deserve housing they can be proud to call home,” Will Shafroth, president and CEO of NPF, expressed in the press release.
Photo Courtesy NPS
The American Story
Finally, the new $100 million influx will be used to tell a more complete story of the U.S. NPF notes that almost half of America’s parks are “historical or cultural in their mission,” but “too few Americans visit many of these parks or even know they exist. We want to change that.” It, therefore, aims to tell America’s complete story, celebrate all of the diverse people, places, and events that helped us get to where we are today, and continue to celebrate our democracy and “point us forward with hope and promise.”
A huge part of this involves documenting and shedding light on stories that have long gone untold. The Inclusive Storytelling program, launched last year, has thus far provided $2 million in grants and support for 31 interpretative projects.
These include:
- Preserving cultural artifacts;
- Producing new or updating old interpretive materials, ranging from oral histories to videos; and
- Hiring interpretive park rangers or research interns.
One of the members of the inaugural cohort of grantees, the Nez Perce National Historical Park, is using its funding to work with the Nez Perce, Colville, and Umatilla Tribes to record the stories of Nimíipuu leaders in the English and Nimiipuutímt languages, as well as to create a space in the Visitor Center for nimíipuu storytelling sessions.
Another, the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, is commissioning new works from local poets of African ancestry and building a Poetry of Slavery and Freedom multimedia interpretive trail. Meanwhile, the Thomas Edison National Historical Park is hiring an intern to research Mina Edison’s contributions to women’s history and use it to produce a handbook and new programming.
Photo Courtesy NPS
NPF also invests in research, education, and innovative interpretation to ensure those stories can be preserved long into the future. It operates several funds, including an African American Experience Fund and the Fund II Civil Rights Historic Preservation program, a Latino Heritage Fund, and a Native American Fund that seek to work with those respective communities and highlight their histories.
For example, NPF has provided funding to create new parks, such as the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, commemorating a Civil Rights Movement leader whose murder led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
NPF also bought 3,400 more acres to add to the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, which memorializes the more than 230 members of the Arapaho and Cheyenne Plains Tribes who were killed during peace negotiations in 1864.
With the new funding from the Lilly Endowment, in addition to the help of generous donors like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the country’s national parks will continue to engage with young and diverse people, preserve important natural and historic locations, ensure visitors can enjoy those sights far into the future, and guarantee that all the groups that have participated in building America share some of the spotlight. As Chuck Sams, director of NPS, predicted in the press release, “The impact of this gift will be felt in our parks and in surrounding communities for generations to come.”
