For the Love of the Lake - White Rock Lake Park

For the Love of the Lake (FTLOTL) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and enhancement of White Rock Lake Park as an urban oasis. White Rock Lake Park is located in the heart of Dallas, Texas, and is twice the size of New York City’s Central Park!  This naturally-preserved recreation site attracts hundreds of thousands of people each year to enjoy outdoor activities including running, cycling, family picnics, team sports, sailing, and kayaking. FTLOTL depends on donations to provide supplies to our volunteers, run our volunteer programs, and to fund projects within White Rock Lake Park. It is the goal of FTLOTL to engage the broad and diverse community of volunteers, including individuals, families, schools, organizations, companies, and anyone at all, to become actively involved at White Rock Lake Park. FTLOTL organizes many activities at the lake that focus on beautification and restoration at White Rock Lake Park, including:

• The Second Saturday Shoreline Spruce-Up events (S4), held on the second Saturday of each month, rain or shine, is open to the community at large. Second Saturday volunteers pick up litter in the park and along the shoreline of the lake. As of August 2024, there have been 331 consecutive S4 events spanning 28 years.   To date in 2024, FTLOTL volunteers and Board of Directors collected an estimated 153 cubic yards of trash from the park and provided Dallas Park and Recreation Department an estimated 12,000 hours of volunteer labor.
• Our Adopt-A-Shoreline program (AAS) is perfect for the civic-minded business, church, non-profit organization, school, or company. AAS groups adopt a section of the shoreline or park and do their part on a monthly basis to keep it litter-free.
• Our Padillacs program is a water-based volunteer group of experienced kayakers and canoers who get out onto the lake to retrieve litter that cannot be reached from the shoreline. FTLOTL has six canoes and three kayaks available to use on our Second Saturdays on a first-come, first-served basis.
• The Celebration Tree Grove (CTG) is a place where people can honor, celebrate, and remember loved ones by contributing to ongoing reforestation efforts at White Rock Lake Park. In collaboration with Dallas Park and Recreation Department, CTG has planted more than 2,000 trees within White Rock Lake Park.

For the Love of the Lake supports the local Texas Stream Team, a network of volunteer citizen scientists who collect and test water at White Rock Lake and its streams. Dedicated to protecting the environment, they gather information about the quality of Texas water. FTLOTL also collaborates with the BMW Dallas Marathon and enlists volunteers from across the metro-plex to participate as course guides for the annual marathon.