We'll work through neighborhood organizations to build support and funding for park extensions to safely and seamlessly bring walkers, runners, and bike riders into San Diego's Crown Jewel, Balboa Park. These extensions into Balboa Park will be an opportunity for each neighborhood to protect and project its unique cultural and architectural character, while bringing the benefits of Balboa closer to residents, improving park access, and linking public amenities to the core neighborhood business districts.

Our core neighborhoods will be linked to each other through a beautiful, welcoming perimeter path to make the walk, jog, or bike trip into and through Balboa not just pleasant and enjoyable, but an absolute draw and core benefit to living in any of the surrounding neighborhoods. In turn, each neighborhood will have defined its cultural and commercial core with a protected public space or plaza that represents the neighborhood at its best and link it directly to Balboa Park's new perimeter path with a safe, welcoming, high quality linear park or greenway. Once completed, all of our surrounding neighborhoods will have vibrant, popular cores, little hearts, that link us and our neighbors and visitors back to every other neighborhood through Balboa Park, our cultural and civic heart.

In a perfect world, Balboa Park and the City would find this to be a compelling investment and just do it. Until that unlikely world manifests, it will be on the neighborhoods and interested orgs to do all of the legwork of organizing, shepherding, funding, surveying, piloting, and building. Our approach will be to focus on small, doable projects connecting the neighborhoods to Balboa. These can be completed relatively quickly with neighborhood buy-in while the longer-term vision for a perimeter path is pursued. 

We'll begin by organizing neighborhoods around the visions best suited to specific corridors where the economic and cultural benefits can be maximized - to be successful these have to be neighborhood-first projects with overwhelming support from the neighbors and business groups; no one wants to look out at a park and feel like it was imposed upon them by some outside group. As neighborhoods define their character and refine the visions to for their cores and park corridors, we'll be seeking funding sources to complete the necessary studies and regulatory hurdles and ultimately contract out to build the parks and plazas wherever possible.

We're early days! We're looking for volunteers to help us refine pitch decks with compelling renderings and designs, connect with community groups, navigate regulations and permitting, organize capital stacks and finance structures, and to find grants and other public monies. Even if you're not a planner, engineer, or financial analyst, we'd love to have your help if you're enthusiastic about the vision of bringing Balboa Park to our neighbors.