By: Shelly Barrick Parsons, Capital Trees Executive Director

Last month I traveled to Austin, Texas for Greater and Greener 2026, a gathering of parks leaders, city staff, and nonprofit partners from across the country. Over a few days of bike tours, boat rides, panels, and peer conversations, one thing became clear: the cities doing greenspace well aren’t doing anything magical. They’re just patient, intentional, and deeply collaborative.

Here’s what stuck with me — and what it means for our work back home.

A Trail Is Not Just a Trail

One of my first tours was of the Red Line Parkway, the beginning of a 36-mile multi-modal trail that will eventually run alongside Austin’s commuter rail and bus line. The name matters: it’s not the “Red Line Trail.” It’s a parkway. That word choice signals that greenspace isn’t an afterthought tucked beside the tracks — it’s the organizing vision for the whole corridor.  This is important thinking as the Richmond region develops the Fall Line Trail.  A trail can just move people from one place to another, or it can be designed, from day one, as a green spine that shapes how a region grows.

Decades of Vision Pay Off

On an evening boat tour along the Colorado River and Lady Bird Johnson Trail, our guides talked about the bats that pour out from under the Congress Avenue Bridge every night — now a genuine tourist draw — and about the decades of tree canopy and trail investment. None of this happened overnight. It started with Lady Bird Johnson’s commitment to preserving green corridors long before Austin was the boomtown it is today.  That long view is still what drives investment in the city now. It’s a good reminder that the greenspace work we do today isn’t really for this fiscal year, or even this decade — it’s for the city our community will live in fifty years from now.

Community Isn’t a Checkbox

On a walking tour through East Austin we learned how redlining and interstate construction tore through communities decades ago, how rapid growth is now triggering displacement, and how local parks and nonprofits are working to engage — really engage — the communities most affected as they restore neglected park spaces. The lesson was blunt: you can’t pay lip service to community engagement. It has to actually be the priority, not a line item. That means showing up, listening, and honoring the history and culture of a neighborhood — and staying engaged well past a project’s ribbon-cutting.

I saw the same principle from a different angle in a panel on activating vacant park land, where nonprofits talked about identifying and developing parcels guided by community input while staying alert to the risk of gentrification. (Shoutout to Parks & People in Baltimore — a great example of this work at a scale similar to ours.)

Green Infrastructure Needs the Whole City Rowing Together

A bike tour along Lady Bird Lake highlighted Austin’s green stormwater infrastructure — and the very real, very familiar challenges of keeping it healthy: die-back from runoff, wear from heavy use, plants behaving differently than expected after a hard freeze. Sound familiar? It should. Every city managing living infrastructure deals with this.

What makes Austin’s system work isn’t that they’ve solved these problems — it’s that the city’s departments share a vision. Projects like Waterloo Greenway exist because Austin’s waterworks department believes stormwater should be managed through green infrastructure, not despite that belief. The collaboration that needs to happen between a city and its nonprofit partners also has to happen between a city’s own departments. One without the other falls apart.

Photo Credit: Erika Gay

Stronger Boards, Stronger Partnerships

Not everything was about trails and rivers. In peer conversations on board governance, leaders shared hard-won practices on building strong boards, pairing mentors with new trustees, and keeping the board/executive director relationship healthy. In a session I co-led on emerging citywide park nonprofits, we dug into the tension every growing nonprofit faces: staying ambitious with a small team, maintaining independence while working hand-in-hand with a public park system, and building the kind of trust that earns you “quick wins” early on.

The Through Line

If there’s one idea connecting everything I saw in Austin, it’s this: greenspace becomes essential to a city — economically, culturally, environmentally — when an entire ecosystem of people decide to think bigger than their own project, their own department, or their own fiscal year. Collaboration, focus, patience, and genuine community partnership aren’t soft add-ons to this work. They are the work.