It’s My Park Day for Cub Scout Pack 59 at Highland Park

By Alana Moehring Mallard

More than 75 volunteers with Cub Scout Pack 59, including girl and boy Cub Scouts, families, and friends, with beautification efforts at Highland Park Elementary and Perry Park as part of It’s My Park Day on March

4. It’s My Park Day is Austin Parks Foundations biggest volunteer event of the year.

Pack 59 Community Chair Peter Ruggero said the Austin Parks Foundation donated 20 cubic feet of mulch and loaned tools to the Scouts’ efforts at Highland Park.

“I’m taking it to the trees and dumping it out,” said Cub Scout Niles Cunningham as he pulled a load of mulch heaped up on one of the black plastic sleds borrowed from Austin Parks Foundation. As the morning’s work wrapped up, dozens of playground and school grounds trees and shrubs – oaks, sycamores, pecans, yaupon, crepe myrtle -- had fresh mulch spread under them.

Pack 59’s Tiger Den leaders are Steve Walkup, Belinda Arumbula, and Elizabeth Huffmaster. Pack 59 is chartered by Covenant Presbyterian Church on Northland. Cub Scout and first-grader John Walkup likes volunteering he said, and likes Cub Scouts. What does he like about being in scouts?

“We go camping and we learn to tie knots,” John said.

This year, 3,301 It’s My Park Day volunteers worked on 84 park projects totaling nearly 10,000 volunteer hours, giving much needed care to ice storm damaged parks. Austin Parks

Foundation estimates that volunteers on It’s My Park Day donated time worth almost $300,000. The next city wide It’s My Park Day is Saturday, Nov. 4.