Please help us restore weekend evening table tennis at Green Lake Community Center

The Green Lake Community Center announced in September of 2021 that after 26 continuous years, they could no longer provide weekend table tennis. The reason given was that the off-hours weekend program violated cash handling policy and was non-standard within Seattle Parks & Recreation (SPR). This cut has reduced our average evening hours from about 13.5 per week to slightly under 5 hours. The gym now sits idle on Saturday and Sunday evenings. Many feel that this change was unfair and out-of-touch with the needs of the community. There are now about twice as many players waiting to play as there are spots at the tables on our remaining weekdays.

Following the 2021 announcement, the GLTTC aligned with Seattle Parks Foundation (SPF) for fiscal sponsorship and presented a proposal in which SPF would pay the cost of the required recreation attendant with funds coming from player donations. This would effectively extend Seattle Parks and Recreation’s free weekday drop-in table tennis to weekends with no incremental cost to SPR. SPR has not yet responded to this proposal. We are now starting an advocacy campaign have our weekend playtime restored. 

The first step in our advocacy campaign will be an online petition that we can present to the Seattle City Council and SPR management. Please click the following link to fill out the petition form. We need all of you to sign! https://act.newmode.net/action/seattle-parks-foundation/save-green-lake-community-center-weekend-table-tennis-0

The next step will be to schedule meetings with our Seattle councilmembers and SPR management. We will also want to start attending public meetings where we can advocate for our program. There will be a meeting on Zoom to plan the campaign. Please go to https://doodle.com/meeting/participate/id/e3wQ2nAe to indicate when you can attend.

Ongoing information about our advocacy campaign can be found at glttc.org

I've been a dedicated volunteer at the GLTTC for 15 years. I'm following on the efforts of many others such as Steffen Plisterman, Michael Wang, Raymond Loc, Phil and Karen Lam, John Zhang, Tom Veatch, and others. I don't want to see this end. We can make our program even better with all our efforts.

Thank you,

Kim Goldov