July 26, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Affleck named Friends of Wissahickon president
by KRISTIN PAZULSKI

Cindy Affleck

After about 25 years as a fulltime volunteer, focusing on gardens and park life in a city that has the largest urban park in the country, Cindy Affleck knows a thing or two about how to utilize urban open space. Which is why after four years on the board of the Friends of the Wissahickon, she was chosen to serve as the board’s president in May.

“Affleck comes with a knowledge of the role public parks play in building civil life,” said Maura McCarthy, FOW’s executive director. “She has a really great vision for what we can accomplish in the community.”

Affleck has been part of the Garden Club of America, serving as a flower arrangement judge and national judging chairman from 2004-2006 as well as a number of leadership positions. For the Philadelphia Flower Show, she was the chairman of judges and awards in the 1980s and early ’90s, and she’s been an exhibitor in the show since 1982.

She is still a member of the Wissahickon Garden Club, of which she’s been a member for 25 years and served as the club’s conservation chairman and she’s a board member of the Fairmount Park Conservancy, through which she became involved with the Women for the Water Works and co-chaired last year’s 2006 fundraiser at the Water Works, which funded some of the completion of the South Garden and Cliff Walk renovations.

FOW, which is 83 years old, is one of the city’s “friends of parks” organizations with the most potential, Affleck said.

Just four years ago, FOW, like all the other city’s friends groups, was a volunteer-based organization. In 2002, however, FOW received a $275,000 capacity building grant from the William Penn Foundation that helped it organize into a more professional organization and hire both a development director and executive director.

“We’ve been able to take on a very ambitious program because we are such an active board,” Affleck said.

Affleck joined the FOW board just as it received the grant and was developing itself into that professional organization. “I came on during a very pivotal time,” Affleck said.

“She really has been a part of FOW’s transformation, and she’s helped the organization become a peer and partner with the city,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy and Affleck both recognize the importance of an organization like FOW, which has access to grants and volunteers to help support the city’s park system, an underfunded program. Affleck said she strongly believes, and wishes more people would realize the importance of getting involved in community and civic life, and not expect the city and government to take care of everything.

“The government doesn’t always have the resources,” she said. “It’s up to the community to not sit and wait for things to happen. You have to step up and do it yourself.”

And for the city’s underfunded urban parks, FOW is the perfect opportunity to fill a large need.

For example, two of the projects it has in the works are the sustainable trails initiative and working with local groups to protect the Wissahickon’s watershed.

The trails initiative “is going to be huge,” Affleck said.

FOW is improving and renovating about 57 miles of trail so they can be used more often. Another part of that project is to potentially add volunteer ambassadors — people stationed along the trails that can direct, provide a sense of security and share knowledge of the park with interested passers-by.

Affleck said some locals take Fairmount Park for granted, which unlike many urban parks was not man-made, but actual preserved wilderness.

“This is a wilderness and that’s why our mission is to preserve and protect our urban wilderness,” she said.

Publicizing the trails and park’s benefits will also be another important FOW initiative.

To better preserve the watershed, FOW is working to partner with other groups, such as the Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association, Whitemarsh Foundation and Springfield Township, to expand FOW’s capacity to improve the Wissahickon.

“The whole idea of partnering with other organizations is terribly important because … it’s good for people to know the projects that we’re doing are for more than just us,” Affleck said. “It’s helping people upstream and downstream.”

McCarthy said one of the best assets to having Affleck lead the board is that she’s so active herself. “She would never ask a board member or staff to do something she can do herself,” McCarthy said.

Yet Affleck says the same of McCarthy and the entire 28-member board, calling FOW’s staff “effective and talented.”

“There is no deadwood there,” she said. “Everyone is involved and committed.”

Affleck never sought a position with FOW, but was invited by board member and incoming president Charlie Dilks. She said, though, that as soon as she became part of it she was hooked. Plus, since many of the groups she was involved with were nationally or city-wide focused, the Wyndmoor resident was happy to be working with a group so close to her neighborhood.

“I did have a desire to be more locally involved, and it’s made me even more interested in my own community,” she said.