Meet the Man Trying to Make Richmond’s James River a World-Class Park
The James River cuts clean through the middle of Richmond, Virginia. Its many islands, banks, and overlooks make up the James River Park system, one of the more noteworthy aspects of an otherwise not widely recognized city. There’s never a day where the river isn’t dotted with kayaks, and the park system hosts two million visitors a year. What many Richmonders don’t know is that the whole system of parks is funded solely by the City of Richmond. That’s where the non-profit volunteer organization Friends of the James River Park (FOJRP) comes in.
Josh Stutz is the executive director of FOJRP. Although the organization was founded in 1999 and has been slowly gaining traction since then, Stutz was hired as the first-ever full-time employee just last July. Stutz has no prior experience with parks; his area of expertise is nonprofits, having previously worked for museums and homeless shelters. But the lack of parks experience doesn’t limit his ambition for the Friends of James River Park, nor the future of Richmond’s park scene.
In a general sense, what does FOJRP do?
Our broad mission is to protect, expand, and enhance the James River Park system. As a nonprofit organization, we accept donations, we write grants, we work with the city to implement projects using those funds that we raise. I like to think that we’re sort of the ketchup on the hot dog. They’re sort of the main part of the hot dog- day to day management, upkeep of the park- we’re working on bigger projects, thinking long term, and focusing on how to really engage the community and how to build a park.
The James River Park system is still seen as sort of elitist. Every activity in the parks except for hiking has a high barrier of entry. Like mountain biking, kayaking, rock climbing. All of these things require some investment of time and money. So it’s seen as very white centric, very wealth centric in terms of what the park is used for, and we want to work to change that by increasing accessibility. And I think that’s more easily done through nonprofit than through the city. We’re less susceptible to the whims of the political changes.
FOJRP has been making a lot of progress in the past couple of years. What does the future look like?
We have sort of the broad vision for what the park is going to be in 10 years. I think there’s some effort to work towards building a private conservancy to manage the park. The model we’re looking at is the Central Park Conservancy. It does a great job managing that without funding from the city. We’re not on that level of funding or anything, but I’d like to see the James River Park fit into that model in 10 years.
So to get to that point, you have a lot of growing to do as an organization. How do you go about that?
We are slowly building towards some great marketing initiatives getting some projects done. This year is the 50th anniversary of the park, so we’ll be doing some celebrations around the summer, drawing some attention to it. I think it’s baby steps. It starts with something like us having us handle all the capital projects of the park. Once we start building towards an endowment and the standard nonprofit practices, where we can have steady funding through our own means. . . We’ve got a long way to go.
I’m curious about the sort of people you get as volunteers, because they’re really the heart of this.
It’s a mix of retirees and corporate groups, for the most part. They will often make a donation alongside their volunteer effort, they get a little PR out of it. We have some school groups too. There are challenges to what effective volunteerism looks like. You don’t want to go around creating activities just because somebody wants to volunteer. We are organizing some big volunteer days in April around graffiti removal, my new pet project. I’m just strained every time I go to the park and have to see people having spray painted the rocks. I want to find these people and fight them.
Aside from graffiti removal, what else do volunteers do in the park?
Trash cleanup is a big one, building projects as we have them come up. A lot invasive plant removal, things they don’t need to bring natural talent to. We’re also looking more towards skill-based volunteering now. So folks in finance, city planning, or people who have served in urban background really help out as we look to design new projects, new greenways, and new ways to access the park.
Water quality has always historically been a big problem for the James. Just last year there was a lawsuit because like, millions of gallons of sewage were leaked into the river, right?
There was a sewage leak in the August, September timeframe. There wasn’t actually a bacterial spike in Richmond. We still closed beaches as a precaution, we still asked people to stay out of the water, but in the end it was a lot of hype for no noticeable change in the amount of chemical indicators we look for to indicate a problem. People think it’s gross, and it is gross. But the reality is it didn’t have big an impact. I mean, people were still out kayaking. Really, every time it rains, we have the same problem- it was designed to do that. That’s the downside of living in a 250-year-old city.
Do you have any closing thoughts for the patrons of James River Park?
My main message is, thank you for coming out. It’s important to remember that it’s a community space, the city of Richmond pays a lot of money to upkeep it. The thing that always blows me away is that we have maybe 1,000 people who donate each year to our organization. But the park gets 1.96 million visitors every year- as many visitors a year as go to King’s Dominion. And you’re paying 75 bucks a head to visit that amusement park. We’re providing a much more robust service for much less, even if you factor in taxes and everything else if they live in the city. If I’m giving a dollar for each time that I go to the park, that adds up. If even 1% of that 2 million people choose to participate in that way, we really can build something here that is world class. I think it is as culturally significant as Central Park to this area. The Capital Trail, everyone said that was impossible, right? When people said, “Let’s make a 50 mile bike trail that runs from here to Jamestown.” So I don’t think it’s crazy. Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t think it’s crazy.
