Walk the new stretch of sidewalk at Westminster Place and you will pass a playground built to look like it grew there, a water feature, new trees, and a wrought iron gate that did not exist two years ago. Most people assume the city built it. The city bought the land, two houses on a dead-end block, turned the west end into a cul-de-sac, and wrote a check for the construction. But the reason that water feature gets cleaned, the reason the flower beds along Grand Boulevard bloom on schedule, and the reason there is a person you could actually call if a bench needs fixing has almost nothing to do with city hall.
It has to do with a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Nichols Hills Parks, Inc., a 28-member volunteer board that has quietly run the maintenance and improvement side of every park in this two-square-mile city since 1983. If you have lived here for years and never heard of it, you are not alone. That gap between what people assume and how the parks actually work is the whole story.
What the City Actually Pays For
The division of labor is narrower than most residents think. The city mows, waters, and covers utilities. Everything else, the seasonal flowers, the pollinator plantings, the playground upkeep, even the Christmas lights strung along Grand Boulevard and 63rd Street every winter, is funded entirely through donations to Parks, Inc. There is also a separate, formal Board of Park Commissioners, a nine-member public body that reviews and recommends improvements. But the money and the hands-on work run through the nonprofit, not the city budget.
That structure explains something residents feel without naming it: why some corners of Nichols Hills look meticulously tended while others feel more like plain grass. It comes down to whether that specific park has an active chairman and a donor base behind it.
One Chairman Per Park
Each of the city's 37 parks has its own volunteer chairman, responsible for raising money and organizing upkeep for that one park specifically. Casey Williams, the current chair of Parks, Inc. as a whole, spent 14 years running that operation for Woods Park alone before being appointed president of the citywide organization last year, succeeding Susan Marshall, who had chaired the organization since its 1983 founding.
The group's signature fundraiser, the Nichols Hills Garden Tour, dates back to 1990, when it was launched by Ann Taylor and Susan Marshall. This year's tour ran Saturday, June 13, with tickets that started at $20 and tours through five private gardens on homes along Huntington Avenue, NW Grand Boulevard, Windsor Place, and Wilshire Boulevard. If you missed it in June, the proceeds from that single Saturday help fund the maintenance schedule you are seeing right now, in August, as much as any other month.
What $3.64 Million Actually Bought
This year, Nichols Hills completed two park projects totaling $3.64 million, and the way that money was raised tells you more about the neighborhood than the number itself.
Westminster Park, the city's first park in Ward 3, cost $1.4 million and was funded and built by the city directly. It involved purchasing two residential homes on the 1800 block of Westminster Place and converting the west end of that block into a cul-de-sac, with new playground equipment, sidewalks, trees, fencing, and a water feature. Planning had been underway since 2023, and construction itself took less than a year, with landscape architect Scott Howard designing the space and Rudy Construction building it.
Redbud Park, the renovated green space along Grand Boulevard at Sherwood Lane, cost $2.24 million and was funded almost entirely by residents. A capital campaign co-chaired by Nancy Herzel and Jamie Farha raised the money, anchored by a $500,000 lead gift from Robert and Karen Browne. In total, residents donated more than $1.1 million toward that single project.
Add the two together and you get the $3.64 million figure the city announced this spring. But that total flattens an important difference. One park exists because the city assembled land and wrote a construction check. The other exists because a handful of neighbors organized a capital campaign and enough people wrote personal checks to cover it. Both are now maintained the same way, by the same volunteer network, funded going forward by the same donation stream.
The Wishlist Is a To-Do List, Not a Complaint
Williams has been candid about what is missing. Asked what she would like to see if more land ever comes available, she pointed to
"a dog park or a picnic pavilion, something other than an additional green space"
along with public tennis and pickleball courts. That wishlist matters less as a complaint and more as an instruction manual. Nothing on it will show up because enough residents call city hall to ask for it. It will show up the way Westminster and Redbud did, through a specific parcel becoming available, a chairman stepping forward, and a fundraising campaign that residents choose to fund.
If you have ever wondered how to get something built in this neighborhood, that is the actual mechanism. It runs through Parks, Inc., not through a petition.
The Calendar Underneath It
Some of the smaller, recurring pieces of the park system are worth knowing even if they will not make a headline. In past summers, the Nichols Hills Band has played a free monthly concert at Kite Park on the third Thursday of June and July, mixing pop, Broadway, and jazz for an all-ages crowd on the lawn. If you missed this year's run, it is worth putting the third Thursdays of next summer on the calendar.
There is also a pollinator garden tucked below Nichols Hills Methodist Church that Williams has called her favorite project on the roster, describing it as the most labor-intensive planting area the organization maintains. It is currently open for adoption, meaning a resident or family could put their name on it for the year. Small as it sounds, that is the same mechanism at work again: a piece of shared ground that only exists in its current form because someone decided to fund and tend it personally.
The Actual Takeaway
None of this changes how the parks look on a Tuesday evening walk. The grass is still cut, the paths are still swept, and Grand Boulevard Park still curves the same way it has for years. What changes is understanding why. Every flower bed, every new playground, every string of holiday lights represents a specific decision by a specific neighbor to pay for it, not a line item that renews itself automatically. The 37 parks are less a city department and more a standing civic habit that residents have kept alive, one chairman and one donation at a time, for over four decades.
That habit is worth knowing about even if you never plan to chair a park or write a check to one. It is part of what makes the neighborhood function the way it does, quietly and without much fanfare, block by block.
If you are curious what that kind of neighborhood commitment does for property values here, or you are simply weighing a move within Nichols Hills and want someone who actually knows which park your future backyard sits closest to, Cole Strickland can walk you through it in plain terms. Get Your Instant Home Valuation and start the conversation from real numbers, not guesswork.