Located across the street from the Heurich House Museum, the 800-square-foot Sonny Bono Memorial Park was dedicated to artist Sonny Bono in 2005. Over the years as the park was neglected and plants were not cared for; now the park needs rehabilitation to become an appealing and accessible part of our neighborhood again.
The Heurich House Museum has adopted the park and is now seeking community support to help revitalize the park. Our goal is to plant a low maintenance garden with beautiful year-round color that will enhance the space, provide visual appeal, and create a more welcoming park for this part of Dupont Circle.
We hope to use our ioby project to engage local residents in the immediate vicinity of the park to volunteer or donate funds to the project. Funds raised through ioby would be used to remove the current soil and dead plants, and to help pay for the planting of low maintenance, full sun plants.
The museum seeks $3000 in donations for community stakeholders to assist with purchasing new plants and benches for the community park. In addition, we hope to recruit a group of committed volunteers who will help implement the project later this fall when funding has been secured and the climate is more amenable to planting new landscaping.
Sonny Bono Park is located across the street from the Heurich House Museum. For years, the museum has witnessed the park fall into disrepair and has invested its own resources into cleaning the park or arranging for maintenance of the park through the local business improvement district. In 2014 the museum made the decision to adopt the park so that it could begin fundraising and plan for a complete renovation of the park, which is much needed. The D.C. Department of Parks approved the Heurich House Museum as a Park Partner in early 2015.
The goal of our ioby campaign is to drum up community support by soliciting monetary donations and volunteers to help implement the master garden plan for the park. We have already been receiving support from local community blogs and civic associations who are interested in helping, and we hope to capitalize on this publicity and swell of community support by launching our ioby campaign by August 7.