The Second Annual "America Is Your Park" Campaign Underway

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

The National Park Foundation, in partnership with Coca-Cola, America’s State Parks and the National Recreation and Park Association, recently launched the second annual “America Is Your Park” campaign.

The three parks that receive the most votes by September 6th will be awarded recreation grants, made possible by the Coca-Cola “Live Positively” initiative, in the following amounts:

First Place - $100,000
Second Place - $50,000
Third Place - $25,000

There are several ways people can vote between now and September 6th:

1. Click on their favorite park at LivePositvely.com and vote

2. Upload photos of themselves in their favorite park to LivePositvely.com

3. Starting August 10th, they can upload video of themselves in their favorite park to LivePositvely.com

4. Starting July 11th, people also can vote by checking into a park using Facebook Places

There is no limit on the amount of times you can vote.

Right now, after about a week of voting, the Great Smoky Mountains is in third place. Little Ocmulgee State Park out of Georgia is in second, which was also a park that was among the top vote getters last year. In first place, and with a commanding lead, is Soudan Underground Mine State Park in Minnesota. Coincidentally, it was Bear Head Lake State Park, literally just down the road from Soudan Mines, that came out of nowhere last year to take the $100,000 grant and upset the front-running Smokies.

For the next two months fans of the Smoky Mountains will have their work cut out for them.....


Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com

2 comments

Anonymous said...

You may be aware that the folks who organized and voted Bear Head Lake State Park to such a whopping victory lsat year were the fans of this Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/lily.the.black.bear

They chose Soudan Mines park this year, because it is another one used by the research bears of the North American Bear Center (Lily the Black Bear page is the fan page for NABC), and as you can see, they are voting by the thousands.
The same group is also voting in very large numbers for Little Ocmulgee Park to keep them in second place above GSMNP. You can read their Facebook page and see evidence of this if you peruse back through the week:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Little-Ocmulgee-State-Park/137083233113

Against this kind of numbers and determination, the Smokies fans need to get serious and vote daily for at least five to ten minutes to get competitive...and I mean thousands of us voting if possible. This beautiful National Park is FREE to us, give back a litte and VOTE everyone!

The Smoky Mountain Hiker said...

Anon - very interesting. I kind of thought that there may have been a connection with Lily. But why Ocmulgee? I did see that there are definitely people from Minnesota posting on the Ocmulgee page.

If this is true that there's some type of collusion going on, then would you have to assume they have it in for GSMNP for some reason? Do you or anyone else know why this would be? Maybe it's they don't think the big "rich" parks should continue to get "richer"...