A First-of-its-Kind Partnership: How SAAS and the South Park Community are Sparking Change 

By: Sarah-Mae McCullough, Editorial Content Manager

It seemed unlikely, maybe even implausible, back in 2016. 

How could an independent school on Capitol Hill and a South Seattle neighborhood fighting for public resources—two distinct communities separated by seven miles—form a long-lasting partnership? It seemed a tall order for SAAS and the South Park community to combine their different resources and strengths to support kids, let alone spark one transformative project after another: a community center, an athletic field, hundreds of hours of free youth programming. 

Could they possibly, alongside the City of Seattle and the Seattle Parks Foundation, pilot a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership in the Emerald City?

But SAAS Co-Head of School Rob Phillips thought about these questions differently. “How could we not?” It was a path that reflected shared priorities between SAAS and South Park: access for all and opportunities for young people. It was a good idea and, as the old SAAS motto goes, “Nothing supersedes a good idea.” 

10 years of advocacy by South Park leaders, support from SAAS, thoughtful partnership, and collaboration with the City of Seattle have since created profound results. This year, we celebrated the opening of the redeveloped South Park Campus, with a renovated community center, playground, dog park, parking lot, and more—a welcoming third space for the South Park community, with an athletic field that SAAS Athletics will rent during select times. This year also marks 10 years of SAAS faculty and students providing free youth programs, leading sports, robotics, music production, and art activities for kids in South Park. 

While these milestones are significant, the partnership runs deeper than a field or a camp. It’s a long-term connection between community members committed to putting kids first—a commitment so powerful it begged the question: How could we not?

The Beginning of a Longtime Partnership

Two once-separate missions, two communities striving to support young people, came together to form the SAAS-South Park partnership. 

The first: a dedicated group of South Park community members, fighting to improve their neighborhood. Community leaders, including Paulina López (Executive Director of the Duwamish River Community Coalition), Robin Schwartz (Advocacy and Community Resilience Manager at DRCC), Carmen Martinez (Director of the Duwamish Valley Youth Corps), and Rogelio Riojas (President of Sea Mar Community Health Centers), and many other residents, had long been advocating for greater public green spaces and opportunities for youth on their side of the Duwamish Waterway. 

The Seattle Parks Foundation, a nonprofit that partners with local communities to champion parks, worked with South Park residents to identify their top priorities for public spaces, creating the South Park Green Space Vision Plan in 2014. Redeveloping the South Park Community Center and its surrounding outdoor spaces was at the top of the list. The need was clear, but the path for funding wasn’t yet. 

Meanwhile, SAAS was pursuing its own big idea: forming a public-private partnership to create a shared athletic field with a local community. Located on a city block, SAAS needed more field access to support its student-athletes. But SAAS’s definition of “partnership” didn’t mean just paying for a field. School leaders wanted to find “a community that we could really engage in, invest in and learn from, and build a deeper relationship with,” Rob said. 

Around 2015, two SAAS alumni parents—Jodi Green, a Seattle Parks Foundation board member, and Mike Halperin, a SAAS Honorary Trustee—recognized the opportunity for SAAS to help create a new athletic field at South Park’s Community Center. Rob agreed that the idea had potential. He started attending weekly meetings at the South Park Community Center in 2016, learning from residents as they discussed local issues like traffic, environmental progress, programs to support kids, and the need for more outdoor spaces. 

With advocacy from South Park community members and support from SAAS, a path to renovate the South Park Community Center and Campus emerged. SAAS would raise $4 million to fund a multisport turf field and LED lights for community and school use, as well as provide youth programming at the site. The Seattle Parks and Recreation Department and the South Park community would draw on public grants and private donations to renovate other parts of the campus, including the community center, a playground, an outdoor fitness zone, a dog park, and a parking lot. 

SAAS’s board was initially cautious about the plan’s feasibility. They wanted to know, “Can we get the City Council to approve it? Can we come to an agreement that all four of these entities can agree on?” Rob said. “There's a reason that nobody else has ever done this before. It’s one of those SAAS stories where, when you look at it objectively, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be possible. But if anyone can do it, it would be South Park leaders, the Parks Foundation, and SAAS.” 

It was a proposal that would drive forward access, engagement, and opportunities for kids. How could we not? In 2019, SAAS signed off on the $4 million fundraising commitment, and the Seattle City Council passed Council Bill 119496, which laid out the strategy for funding and managing the field. 

The playfield was a key component in the South Park Campus redevelopment. But the agreement was also emblematic of the deeper connection that had formed between SAAS and the South Park community. The partnership went far “beyond the dollar investment,” said Paulina López, a community leader and Executive Director of the Duwamish River Community Coalition. “We saw a long-term commitment between SAAS and the South Park community… the opportunity to understand how to work with each other.”

A Field, a Camp, and So Much More

Over the past decade, two major projects have grown from the SAAS-South Park partnership: the South Park Campus and the South Park Summer Camps. Each serves the overlapping SAAS and South Park communities in critical ways. 

The new South Park Campus expands opportunities for SAAS Athletics, while prioritizing the needs of the South Park community. The playfield with LED lights lets community members and sports teams stay active outdoors year-round and safely, even on dark winter evenings. Seattle Parks and Recreation, which owns the campus, will keep the field out of the field scheduling system for up to five years to provide no-barrier, drop-in time for community members—a condition for SAAS’s participation. SAAS Athletics will be able to rent the field for a total of 375 hours annually, or 7.5% of its total availability, during school sports seasons. 

Beyond athletics, the campus is a crucial third place for the neighborhood. On a sunny April afternoon this spring, hundreds of community members gathered outside the just-renovated Community Center for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Project partners, including Rob and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, spoke about the space’s impact before snipping the symbolic blue ribbon. It’s a place for neighbors to meet, for parents to access childcare, for kids to play sports, and for families to gather. 

Paulina addressed the kids and teens in the crowd: “I’m sorry for the soccer matches you missed, I’m sorry for the basketball matches you missed… But this is for you. We have worked very hard for you [with] all these beautiful partners… This is your park. And this is what you deserve.” 

A few months later, she shared: “We’ve seen so many kids come back that we haven’t seen in ages… The park is full of families every day.”

One of the youth programs activating the space is the South Park Summer Camp—another key outcome of the SAAS-South Park partnership. In the Council Bill, SAAS committed to offering 50+ hours of no-cost youth programming annually, starting at the field’s opening date. But faculty and students have surpassed that commitment. 

Craig Tomlinson, SAAS PE teacher, coach, and now full-time South Park Program Director, started collaborating with the Community Center to support soccer programs in 2016. He ran SAAS’s first South Park Summer Camp in 2017, with just about 20 kids participating in athletics for a week. The camp grew year by year. Now, it entails six weeks of athletic, music production, art, and robotics activities, led by SAAS faculty and student volunteers and serving hundreds of kids. Craig also leads after-school enrichment at the middle school Rainier Prep and Concord International Elementary School. 

The camp has been a growth opportunity for everyone involved, Craig said. Faculty and students offer resources and skills from signature SAAS programs—from Music Production to Robotics—and they get to stretch themselves as leaders and engaged community members. 

“For our students and staff, it’s an opportunity to not just have an impact, to make a difference, but to grow as a person as well,” Craig said, “whether it’s learning how to communicate in Spanish or expanding the skills of working with people. It’s a chance to gain a different perspective.”

The SAAS-South Park partnership is much more than a field or camp. It has become a way to learn from each other, form lasting relationships, and adapt to kids’ needs as they come up, now and into the future. It’s also a successful public-private partnership that could become a template for others like it. 

“What if other schools in Seattle engaged in a relationship with a community like South Park in the way we have?” Rob said. “This is one school, one neighborhood, one partnership where we’re learning from and lifting each other up. But what if there were three more of these in our city? What if there were five? What if they were 10?” 

How could we not?