New York City parks have been operating on a slim budget for years, but volunteers are stepping up across the city to keep green spaces maintained. Advocates say volunteer labor has increasingly become part of how city parks are maintained, with regular New Yorkers giving up valuable free time to tend the grounds of green spaces that have become more popular since the pandemic. Heather Lubov, executive director of the nonprofit City Parks Foundation, launched the organization's "NYC Green Fund" in 2020, when budget cuts hit the parks department hard. We fund groups with no budget at all, no bank account at all,” she said. “It would have been worse had we not started keeping tabs on all the weeds around the velodrome,” Wong said.