Park Service and corporate advertising, a dangerous mix

[pmorlan1]

National Park Service (NPS) rangers won’t be decorated with corporate logos à la NASCAR drivers, but the agency’s plan to allow advertising-like recognition of donors, including a beermaker, flirts with making national parks resemble ballparks.

The plan is outlined in “Director’s Order #21: Philanthropic Partnerships,” as my colleague Lisa Rein also has reported, and is designed “to create positive philanthropic partnerships with the NPS and on its behalf.”

Those partners are donors who boost the Park Service budget. But they often want more than a good feeling in return.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/05/09/park-service-and-corporate-advertising-a-dangerous-mix/

There is also this one:

Corporate Branding of National Parks: The Disturbing Link between Philanthropy and Privatization

For the first time in its 100-year history, the National Park Service is quietly preparing to make fundraising a central activity by aggressively soliciting corporate sponsorships using agency personnel as fundraisers.

Joining widespread criticism by watchdog groups and park advocates, Joe Davidson at the Washington Post decries this effort to commercialize the national parks, broaden who can raise money, liberalize the use of sponsorship money, and expand what the government will promise in return.

Private philanthropy has always supported national parks, with occasional flare-ups such as the time the Bush administration attempted to privatize parts of the park service in 2003, and in 2011 when Coca-Cola objected to a plan to prohibit the sale of disposable plastic water bottles in the parks. (The plan was never implemented.) In April 2015, National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis waived agency policies to sign a multimillion-dollar deal with Anheuser-Busch that gave Budweiser unprecedented branding placements during the “quiet phase” of its $350 million Centennial Campaign for America’s National Parks. In February 2016, having raised more than $200 million, the public phase of the campaign commenced with an updated fundraising plan called “Director’s Order #21: Philanthropic Partnerships” (the document is here) that exalts corporate branding. The Centennial Campaign concludes in 2018.

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2016/05/11/corporate-branding-of-national-parks-the-disturbing-link-between-philanthropy-and-privatization/

[newthinking]

1. Why is this happening under a Democratic administration