Floyd Myers: Building Partnerships and Youth Programs Across the National Park Service

Floyd Myers. National Park Service.

Floyd Myers is Chief of Business Development and Partnerships for the National Parks of New York Harbor. His route into the National Park Service was not a typical one.

An unusual path

Myers came from local government. He had been commissioner of the Department of Recreation for the City of Mount Vernon, and when the city's administration changed he wanted to stay in recreation. He calls himself an anomaly in the Park Service: a master's degree in finance, experience with government politics, and years in the music and entertainment industry qualified him to compete for a business role in an agency that works differently from private industry or local government.

As a young New Yorker, he knew little about the Park Service. There was a park in his own town, and New York has 32,000 acres of national park land, but he explained that native New Yorkers tend to think of such places as monuments or places to go, not as part of the National Park System; he learned the word "park" for them only after joining. The Statue of Liberty and Governors Island, both national monuments managed by the Park Service, were places he had visited without realizing they were parks.

The woman who hired him took a chance on someone who saw himself as "green" and an outsider, and his strong work ethic carried him. His first Park Service job was business manager and partnership coordinator in the commissioner's office of the National Parks of New York Harbor.

Through the civil rights parks

Before taking on park leadership roles, Myers spent a couple of years as a National Park Service Urban Fellow, in a program that examined how urban parks would operate over the next century, developing education programs for youth groups; the program had cohorts in cities including Philadelphia, Detroit, New York and Richmond. Then came a series of posts, many of them as acting superintendent or deputy:

Myers with the mayor of Montgomery, the mayor of Tuskegee, and Bernice King. National Park Service.

Every park he has worked at is connected in some way to civil rights. What he has loved is that each, despite their shared themes, has its own culture and community. As an acting leader he met community members directly, learned their stories, and kept an open door. That, he believes, helps visitors and partners feel heard and makes them want to visit and invest in a site, and humanizing hard history makes it easier to take in.

Partnerships and projects

Partnership building, which he learned before joining the Park Service, has been his main tool for change. His partners have included local and state governments and Congress, but above all youth programs. At each park he brought in young people through organizations such as the Greening Youth Foundation, Groundwork USA and the Student Conservation Association; at the Martin Luther King Jr. site, Groundwork USA members have been doing preservation work on historic homes in the district.

Myers, a park ranger and two Greening Youth Foundation interns at the 55th anniversary of the Selma march. National Park Service.

Among the projects he led or supported:

• At Tuskegee Airmen, a "discovery lab," a youth partnership with Tuskegee University that teaches young people to fly planes.
• At Tuskegee Institute, restoration by Groundwork USA of The Oaks, Booker T. Washington's home, and a $4 million grant he wrote for a new exhibit at the George Washington Carver museum.
• On the 54-mile Selma to Montgomery trail, which had interpretive centers in Selma and at the halfway point in Lowndes County but none in Montgomery, a new interpretive center on the campus of Alabama State University to tie the trail together.
• At Paterson Great Falls, funding for a new overlook above the falls and a new building for the facilities division.
• At Booker T. Washington, three miles of split-rail fencing around the whole park.

Myers with YMCA campers. National Park Service.

Opening the door for the next generation

Myers feels responsible for making sure the next generation of public land leaders knows about the Park Service. Most of the young people he works with are from inner cities, and for many, meeting him is their first introduction to it; they get to explore a possible career while doing real work at historic places. Parks are not only in the rural West, he points out: there are more urban parks than many people realize, 24 in New York alone. Gateway National Recreation Area's 32,000 acres offer trails, biking, hiking and kayaking in one place, much like the big western parks.

For Myers, being Black and wearing the green and gray is a source of pride, an opportunity many urban kids have not had, and a responsibility to reach back into his own community. But the Park Service's workforce, and its leadership, do not yet reflect the communities it serves, and in his view there is still a way to go.

Myers with Park Service staff at Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park. National Park Service.

He sees recruitment, and especially the use of hiring authorities, as a major barrier. Hiring authorities are not always used well, and having the authority is different from having candidates with qualifying experience. He wants young people reached through youth programs, or simply brought to parks early, since many from underrepresented groups never visit a park as children and never think of the Park Service as an employer. Not every federal job needs a college degree, and the Park Service needs far more than rangers and biologists: firefighters, mechanics, facility managers, caretakers, physicians, museum curators, historians, public affairs specialists and more.

Outside the Park Service, Myers owns and is president of Soul on Soul Productions, Inc., a music and film production company, together with his late brother.

Sources

• National Park Service, Youth Programs, "Staff Spotlight: Floyd Myers." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/staff-spotlight-floyd-myers.htm
• Myers's remarks in the spotlight are paraphrased here. The source spells Paterson Great Falls "Patterson"; it is corrected here.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.