AMERICAN RIVER PARKWAY PRESERVATION SOCIETY ORGANIZATIONAL OVERVIEW Preserve, Protect, and Strengthen the American River Parkway, Our Community’s Natural Heart
The American River Parkway Preservation Society (The Society) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation founded by David H. Lukenbill in Sacramento, California in 2003, to help create the conditions that will preserve the natural beauty and resources of the American River Parkway for current and future generations.
The Society is organized as an educational, policy development, and facilitating organization whose strategic work revolves around five guiding principles.
(1) Preserving the Parkway is not an option, it’s a necessity.
• Create the American River Parkway Conservancy for daily management of the Parkway, and seek to have the American River Watershed designated as a National Heritage Area. • Conservancy management shall recruit executive leadership with academic and experiential credentials in nonprofit administration, and incorporate social enterprise fund raising strategies proven successful in other urban parks. • Conservancy management shall adopt a long term funding goal of building a financial endowment for perpetual Parkway funding support.
(2) What’s good for the salmon is good for the river.
• Increase the water capacity of the American River Watershed, ensuring optimal flow and temperature for the salmon run, by constructing the Auburn Dam, and raising the level of Folsom Dam.
(3) Regarding illegal camping by the homeless in the North Sacramento area of the Parkway, social and environmental justice call upon us to help the poor and distressed person, and the poor and distressed community.
• Ensure that public safety and compassion for the homeless, illegally camping in the Parkway, shall be equal responsibilities addressed by Parkway management, community, religious, and business organizations, and local government. • Ensure local nonprofit homeless service organizations work with Parkway management, and other Parkway organizations, to solve the illegal camping problem, seeking creative ways of combining compassion and public safety
(4) If it can be seen from the Parkway, it shouldn’t be built along the Parkway.
• Ensure that visual intrusion by new development be absolutely prohibited forever, with no mitigation.
(5) Regarding new Parkway usages, inclusion should be the operating principle rather than exclusion.
• Ensure that the public ownership and conservancy management operate under the guiding principle that the Parkway belongs to all of the people, who have an inalienable right to recreate within the commons. • Ensure designated seats on the Parkway Conservancy management board for organized stakeholder group representation.
