Prospect Park Alliance Gets New President

By Lisa W. Foderaro

• Sept. 9, 2014

The Prospect Park Alliance, the nonprofit group that raises money for and oversees the daily operation of Brooklyn’s most visited park, has appointed a former New York City parks official as its new president.

Sue Donoghue, who oversaw Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s sustainability and parks blueprint known as PlaNYC, succeeds Emily Lloyd, who left to lead the city’s Department of Environmental Protection for Mayor Bill de Blasio. Ms. Donoghue lives a block from the park.

“With three kids, the park is a big part of our daily existence,” said Ms. Donoghue, whose appointment was approved by the alliance’s board on Tuesday evening. “It’s our backyard and front yard.”

The Prospect Park Alliance, founded in 1987, was one of the first conservancies that set out to transform a long-neglected park. (The Central Park Conservancy began in 1980.) And with its help, the park has undergone a series of renovation and restoration projects.

Last year, the park unveiled the LeFrak Center at Lakeside, a $74 million project that includes two skating rinks; the southeast corner of the park was also restored and redesigned.

Like the leaders of several major park conservancies, Ms. Donoghue, 49, will serve as both the alliance’s president and the park’s official administrator for the parks department. She will oversee a staff of 125 employees when she takes office on Oct. 6. The alliance raises about $4 million annually and brings in $4 million from concessions in the park.

The parks department’s commissioner, Mitchell J. Silver, praised the appointment, saying, “We are extremely happy to have Sue Donoghue back in the parks family full time.” He highlighted her work on PlaNYC, which included the million-trees planting campaign (903,870 so far) and the schoolyards-to-playgrounds initiative, which opened up more than 200 new play areas.

Her appointment also comes as conservancies have been criticized as perpetuating disparities between parks in wealthy and low-income neighborhoods. Defenders of the conservancy model point out that Prospect Park, which has 10 million visits a year, draws from a racially and economically diverse swath of Brooklyn, including Crown Heights, Flatbush, Park Slope and Prospect-Lefferts Gardens.

Ms. Donoghue said one of her priorities would be insuring that the park bounced back each morning from its heavy use.

“It’s wonderful because it shows that people feel so much safer in the park and want to take their families there,” she said. “But we need to plan for that and address that and be able to clean up from that.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 10, 2014, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Ex-City Official to Lead Group That Oversees Prospect Park.