San Mateo County Parks And Recreation Foundation

Programs: The foundation connects people to parks through a variety of programs and volunteer opportunities, including the student conservation association, a youth job-training program. Through this program, the foundation is helping to provide hands-on training, mentorship, and educational opportunities for 30 school-aged crew members each year. These crews work on habitat protection and park improvement projects throughout our parks while also learning about environmental careers. We also connect people to the parks by funding low-income communities transportation needs, such as funding the park shuttle which is a free weekend shuttle that loops between east palo alto, north fair oaks and edgewood and wunderlich county parks. We support volunteer groups to carry out their goals, which range from training docents to lead hikes, repairing storm-damaged trails and providing the shovels, hori hori knives and other tools to weed and re-introduce native plants.

the foundation funds stewardship of the natural resources at edgewood park and natural preserve. This includes efforts to protect and grow the san mateo thornmint, found only at edgewood, as well as efforts to re-introduce the bay checkerspot butterfly at edgewood. We are expanding our efforts to support stewardship of natural resources on san bruno mountain. The foundation also funds bicycle sunday, the year-round event that takes place along caada road, which gets closed to car traffic so cyclists have safe and free reign of the road. We also fund take a hike, the wildly successful monthly hiking meetup which introduces people to a new park or trail during spring and summer months. Additionally, the foundation has raised money for the installation of new trail signs in several county parks. All the coastal parks are next up to receive new signs. The trail signs clearly depict trail names, junctions, amenities and level of difficulty and are numbered so that they correspond to numbers on new park maps.