Tacony Creek Park map is now available in seven languages
The move is meant to encourage park use by building connections with immigrant communities.
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Tacony Creek Park may have a 3.2-mile paved circuit trail that connects to over 370 miles of trails across the region. It may be home to over 100 species of birds and other wildlife. And it may be the only place in the city you can actually see Tacony Creek. But if you don’t read English, navigating the 300-acre park may be difficult.
The Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership (TTF) recently released park maps in seven of the languages most widely spoken in the Lower Northeast neighborhoods near the park.
“There are a lot of people who speak a lot of different languages around the park,” said Julie Slavet, TTF’s executive director. TTF created its user-friendly map in English and Spanish in 2016. “We were pretty proud of it.”
Last year, additional funding allowed Slavet to add maps written in Vietnamese, Mandarin, Haitian Creole, Arabic, and Khmer.
“And a Portuguese version is at the printer now. It will be done [later] this month,” Slavet said.
About 15% of the city’s residents are immigrants, making language access a growing concern. Last February, Philadelphia received its Welcoming City designation after a rigorous audit process to assess the city’s commitment to immigrant inclusion and support.
» READ MORE: Philadelphia is now officially a ‘Certified Welcoming’ city. Here’s what it means for immigrant communities.
Mayor Jim Kenney has consistently maintained immigrants’ importance to the city’s cultural diversity and economic growth. Executive directors Cathryn Miller-Wilson of HIAS Pennsylvania and Margaret O’Sullivan, of the Nationalities Service Center (NSC), recently cowrote an editorial urging Mayor-elect Cherelle Parker to continue that commitment and to put language accessibility high on her agenda.
“For Philadelphia to be truly welcoming, we must have a language access plan that works for all languages, not simply the most popular. Not only is it federal law to accommodate these languages, it is also the right thing to do,” Miller-Wilson and O’Sullivan wrote.
Slavet said she uses translation services to create multilingual documents, including the NSC program, which offers translation and interpretation services in more than 150 languages. According to Steven Larin, deputy director of NSC, the organization works primarily with governmental agencies, large nonprofits and legal services organizations.
Slavet said she also engages community members to proofread the materials to ensure accuracy. “We want to make sure there were no big errors. Words have different meanings in different languages.”
Tacony Creek Park is one of the city’s five watershed parks and the major park for almost 200,000 residents in Olney, East Oak Lane, Lawncrest, Feltonville, Frankford, and Juniata Park—a linguistically diverse set of communities.
The Lenape were the original stewards of the area they called Tookany or Tacony, their word for “woods” or “hidden space.” The creek starts in Montgomery County (where it is known as “Tookany”) and runs through the Northwest and Lower Northeast sections of Philadelphia (where it is called Tacony”). Over time, the city encapsulated its numerous creeks, created a sewer system, leveled the valleys with fill, and replaced the open land with parks, streets, and rowhouses.
The creeks, now hidden, became forgotten and degraded. The park faces serious challenges, including limited maintenance and amenities.
The goal of TTF is to help make the 30-square mile watershed more visible in order to increase community stewardship to limit the pollutants the creek picks up as it flows into the Delaware River, the source of drinking water for half of Philadelphia.
This means getting more people into Tacony Creek Park.
“When you greet people in their language, they feel much more welcome,” said Slavet. “People are very pleased to see the map in their language.”
The free maps are available on the Tacony Creek Park website or people can call 215-744-1853 for a physical copy. Maps will also be available at TTF’s weekly programs and events including Walk with Me, Run with Me, and Creek Care Days.