Great parks make great communities. They’ll make us happier, healthier and more equitable. Yet 100 million Americans, including 28 million kids, don’t have a park inside a 10-minute walk of their homes. Many who do have parks nearby find that they fall far in need of what families and communities need — because they’ve fallen into disrepair or lack relevant recreational opportunities, beauty or nature.

Trust for Public Land (TPL) has long been working to create recent parks and restore underperforming parks where they’re needed most. Here in Minnesota and across the country, communities of color and low-income communities have less access to high-quality parks and green space. In our nation’s largest cities, communities of color have access to 43% less space than majority white neighborhoods. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, a few of the premier park systems within the country in response to TPL’s ParkScore®️ rating, these numbers are 59% and 32% less respectively.

Closing the outdoor equity gap — and ensuring all communities can access the health, happiness and climate advantages that parks and the outside provide — means supporting communities and native governments to create recent parks and to take a position in vital green spaces near home.

TPL is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this 12 months — working nationwide to attach everyone to the advantages and joys of the outside. Here in Minnesota, TPL has worked with amazing community leaders and native partners to create vital recent parks, akin to Midway Peace Park and Frogtown Park and Farm in St. Paul. We proceed to look for methods to partner with area people groups and government agencies to bring safer, accessible green space to more residents.

In lots of neighborhoods, a key to the answer is correct in front of us: transforming barren, underinvested and underused schoolyards into vibrant green parks. With kids across Minnesota back in classrooms, this can be a moment to take into consideration how schoolyards can higher serve our communities, not only in the course of the school 12 months or school day, but year-round.

For a lot of Americans, schoolyards are the general public open spaces nearest home. America’s public schools sit on 2 million acres of land. Transforming schoolyards and opening them to the community during non-school hours puts high-quality greenspace and its many advantages nearby of nearly 20 million people.

Nationwide, TPL has already renovated over 300 blank schoolyards into Community Schoolyards(TM) with work underway in 21 states across the country. In August, we launched TPL’s schoolyard program here in Minnesota in partnership with Brooklyn Center Elementary, where students are designing a schoolyard to serve their communities’ needs. Once complete, the schoolyard will put a high-quality outdoor space inside a 10-minute walk of two,500 Brooklyn Center residents.

Brooklyn Center Elementary is just considered one of six schoolyards that we are going to transform within the years ahead. TPL is partnering with school districts and neighborhoods across Minnesota — rural, suburban, urban — that have a look at their often-empty schoolyards, and dream of something higher. We’ll hearken to neighbors’ ideas and dreams, and convey skilled support to design schoolyard makeovers.

Improving underused publicly owned schoolyards is cost-efficient. It doesn’t require purchasing land in built-up neighborhoods. It requires smarter, nature and community-centered use of land that we’ve already publicly put aside for youths and families.

Currently, public funding for schoolyard makeovers is in its infancy and relies heavily on private donations. Nationally and here in Minnesota, TPL goals to work with federal, state, and native policymakers to grow public funding for smart investments in our Community Schoolyards — creating parks where they’re needed most for the health and wellbeing of our communities.

Schoolyards are a very important place to do higher by Minnesota families. We’d like to rework schoolyards into higher places for youths to learn and grow into stewards of the outside. We’d like to rework them into hubs of community empowerment, improved health and education, and climate resiliency. Renovating our long-neglected public schoolyards is a cost-efficient, commonsense solution to Minnesota’s park equity gap — bringing beauty, joy, outdoor play and resiliency to each neighborhood.

Sophie Harris Vorhoff is the Minnesota state director and associate vice chairman for Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit that partners with the communities it serves to attach everyone to the advantages and joys of the outside.