Preserving Nature, Removing Barriers, Enriching Lives

The City of Oaks Foundation works to promote healthy outdoor lifestyles connected to nature in order to ensure a great outdoors for a great Raleigh through our partnerships with our public parks and recreation programs. We also work to remove financial barriers to participation in the city’s outdoor and recreational activities, especially for children.

Our flagship program, Give Play, helps children from low-income families participate in Raleigh's summer camps and nature programs. The Pay it Forward program expands this concept, assisting any individual, from toddlers to seniors, who would be excluded from nature, arts, and recreation programs due to financial barriers. We also collaborate with partners on projects that promote healthy, active outdoor lifestyles in our community, like the Wake County Senior Games. Through an equity lens we seek to make city programs accessible to youth with specific interests, like land and water conservation and connections to nature through the Neighborhood Ecology Corps, or like science, computing and other STEM fields through our Roots 2 STEM program, where their families’ economic resources would exclude them from participating.

Through this work we can make these great programs available and accessible to everyone in our community.