SF Public Works held its first-ever Street Parks Summit in April, recognizing a parallel maintenance system of 137 volunteer-stewarded micro-parks filling a 200-gardener gap — even as institutional funding collapsed and new grant money begins to flow.

The Quesada Medians in Bayview sit in a neighborhood where tree canopy covers just 6.7 percent of the land — the lowest in the city, by SF Planning's own count, and down by 350 trees since 2022. On a block where green space is scarce, the medians are kept by volunteers, not city crews.

They were also one of five showcase sites at SF Public Works' first-ever Street Parks Summit, held April 18 — a full-day training for volunteer stewards covering grant-writing, landscaping, and maintenance practices. The others: Pennsylvania Garden, Virginia Garden, Glen Park Greenway, and Upper Esmeralda Street Park. What linked them was that none relies primarily on city labor to keep the plants in the ground.

There are now 137 such parks operating across San Francisco, each with a volunteer steward. That number represents the visible edge of a quiet infrastructure: residents who have assumed maintenance of traffic medians, sidewalk slips, and pocket green spaces that the department has no budget to staff. SF Rec & Parks is short approximately 200 gardeners system-wide, with no new positions returning in the current budget cycle. The agency runs 43 community gardens and more than 1,200 park spaces on a staffing line that has not grown to match its footprint; volunteers contribute an estimated 200,000 hours annually to cover the gap.

The institutional scaffolding for this volunteer ecosystem took a significant hit last June, when SF Parks Alliance — a 50-year-old fiscal sponsor that had backed roughly 80 community stewardship organizations — shut down after admitting to misusing $3.8 million in restricted funds. Sutro Stewards, the group that maintains the Mount Sutro forest, lost $175,000 held by the Alliance and laid off all eight staff members before transitioning to Livable City as a new fiscal sponsor.

New money is moving, though the scale is uneven. On April 12, the city distributed $3.3 million in Community Challenge Grants to 25 projects — among them Alemany Farm ($149,917), PODER's Hummingbird Farm Community Hub ($150,000), and Kimbell Community Garden ($81,565). SF Rec & Parks also opened a $6 million Community Opportunity Fund this spring, its first citywide application round in nearly a decade, targeting Environmental Justice neighborhoods — many of which are the same blocks with the least canopy.

Groups like PlantSF have been transforming specific corners without waiting for grants. The 20th Street Biophilic Streetscape in the Mission now covers 5,130 square feet with more than 600 native plants; the Shrader Street Greenway in the Haight runs more than 300 linear feet. These don't appear on the official parks count — they're sidewalk strips, tended week to week by whoever lives on them.

The April summit made formal what has been quietly true for some time: the city cannot maintain its green spaces without the labor of people who are not on the city payroll. In Bayview, the Quesada Medians are green. The canopy count is not.