ANN ARBOR, Mich. – GIVE365 is challenging residents to visit as many of the city’s 163 parks as they can this summer.
The Visit Every Park Challenge, which began in mid-June, features four Ann Arbor parks to visit every two weeks, and will continue throughout the rest of the summer.
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GIVE365 is a program that recruits volunteers to maintain, enhance, and beautify Ann Arbor parks, as well as providing volunteer assistance for park events.
The challenge started as an office competition between GIVE365 employees, but Jessica Cichowlas, the assistant volunteer and outreach coordinator, says they’ve been interested in bringing this concept to the public for a while.
“Within our staff we try to compete with each other every year, just as a team-building activity,” Cichowlas said. “It’s always been a dream of ours to bring it to the public and get the community involved.”
Participants in the challenge can keep track of their progress with a checklist that includes all of the parks with public access. There are prizes for visiting 25, 50, 75,100, and 150 parks, which can be received by emailing at volunteer@a2gov.org or calling at 734-794-6445.
GIVE365 is also featuring four parks at a time over the course of the summer with flyers that provide addresses, facts about the park, and optional family-friendly activities to try out while visiting. The featured parks are updated every two weeks, but the flyers for previous weeks are still available.
Here are the featured parks so far:
For an additional challenge, a letter is hidden in each of the featured parks for participants to find. The same letter is in all four featured parks but a new letter will be hidden in a new batch of parks every two weeks. There are six letters in total. Once found, they can be unscrambled to spell out a location in Ann Arbor where participants can win an extra prize.
GIVE365 is encouraging participants to continue practicing social distancing while visiting the parks, along with bringing plenty of sunscreen and water to help with the heat. More information on parks affected by COVID closures can be found here.
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Because this is the Visit Every Park Challenge’s first year, Cichowlas says that feedback and ideas for next year’s challenge are more than welcome. Challenge participants are encouraged to share photos from their trips on Facebook and Instagram by tagging GIVE365, or by sending an email.
“July is actually national parks and rec month,” Cichowlas said. “Another perfect time for people to get out and enjoy their parks. Obviously there are so many essential workers that have been brought to light now, and [the Parks & Recreation department] is one of them.”