Welcome to Open Voices!

In a time when modern man is more and more surrounded by the built world, beset by ever increasing stress and overwhelmed by technology, the need for open, sacred places in nature is more important than ever. Every neighborhood needs a Walden Pond in their back yard, a place where people can be in nature and reconnect to themselves, to the land, and to each other.

Welcome to Open Voices! We’re so excited to announce the creation of this new blog as a platform where we hope to spread information and stories about the healing power of nature and green development in urban locations.

Our foundation started in 1996, when we started out with the goal of funding publicly accessible urban green space. We believed back then, and still believe with our core to this day, that everyone needs to “be in nature” as nature both heals and unifies us.

16 years later, we’ve funded over 130 open sacred places, and our organization has taken us to places we never could have imagined, and now it is time to take our message to a new platform, where we can engage with all of you. We’ve found that our message and philosophy has resonated with a whole host of people, and now we hope to connect with you in even deeper ways through this blog. To a host of people across the spectrum, we welcome your participation – environmentalists, health care professionals, landscape designers, university presidents, corporate CEOs, and community activists, to name a few.

This new blog, Open Voices, will be updated several times a week with a wide range of content. We’ll have Q&As with prominent people in fields ranging from landscape architecture to urban planning to public health. We’ll collect some of the best and most relevant news in placemaking, green development and more for your reading each week. We’ll keep you updated on the status of our new grantees and their fascinating projects, wherein they attempt to record the impact of open, sacred green spaces on their urban neighborhoods and communities.

All this will be forthcoming, and much more. For now, we welcome you, and are excited you’ll be here to continue our journey with us.