Ask ten people on a sunny Saturday what a successful Dolores Park looks like and you will get ten answers. Someone will say a lawn you can sit on without finding a bottle cap under your blanket. Someone else will say a bin that is not overflowing by three in the afternoon. A parent will say a playground where a dropped wrapper gets picked up before a toddler finds it. None of them are wrong.

At its plainest, success is meeting the result you set out to reach — and the yardstick belongs to the people doing the reaching. Because Dolores Park is shared by tens of thousands of neighbours, visitors and regulars, our measures have to be concrete enough to check, and flexible enough to change as the park and its crowds change.

A good intention is not a result. So we keep score in ways anyone can verify:

• The grass at closing time. How much is still lying on the lawn after a busy Sunday, not just how much went into the bins.
• Volunteer shifts filled. A community day with every slot taken is a win; one that ends with the same six people doing all the work is a warning sign.
• Materials sorted. Recyclables, compost and landfill separated correctly at the Eco-Popup — not just bagged and handed off.
• Public money saved. Cleanup of what is left behind in the park costs taxpayers on the order of $750,000 a year. Every bag that lands in the right stream pushes that figure down.
• What never arrives at all. Roughly two thirds of the litter found on San Francisco streets and in its parks is food and drink packaging. A picnic packed with a reusable cup, fork and container shrinks the pile before it exists.

The easiest way to judge a weekend in the park is to stand at 19th and Dolores on a Saturday, Sunday or holiday between noon and 8 p.m. That is where volunteers and staff run the Eco-Popup, taking bags of trash and recyclables and helping people sort them into the correct bins. It is a small operation with an outsized job: it turns an abstract rule about recycling into something you can do on your way out of the grass.

When the popup is busy and the sorting is quick, the park is working. When people walk past it carrying a bag to the wrong bin, we still have work to do.

Aluminium is the clearest promise in the park: cans beat glass bottles for weight, safety and recycling value. Remelting used cans takes a small fraction of the energy needed to make new metal from raw ore — as a rule of thumb, about twenty recycled cans can be produced with the energy it takes to make a single can from virgin aluminium.

That is a result you can watch filling up in a bin over one afternoon, which makes it a satisfying place to start. Throw your trash in the can rather than on the ground, and keep the grass for bare feet.

We mark the year with Community Days and partner clean-ups, and we count them as successes when the roster fills and the faces come back:

Earth Day Weekend — 4/21 + 4/22
History Day — 5/26
Cheer SF + Pre-Pride — 6/16

Behind those dates are the organisations who have shared the work with us — among them Surfrider in April, The Native Union in May, Leave No Trace in June and Cheer SF in July. The point is not the poster. It is whether the people who showed up once come back, and whether the habits they picked up travel home with them.

Not every event is scored the same way. One volunteer day that draws a dozen people and keeps eight of them for the season can matter more than a headline event nobody returns from. Judge a programme by what it leaves behind after the tables are folded.

Success is often in the eye of the person standing in the grass. A film that flops at the box office can become a cult favourite years later; a pilot project that looks modest in its first month can turn out to be the template everyone copies. In a place like Dolores Park, where a quiet Tuesday and a packed Pride Sunday are genuinely different parks, the criteria have to be read in context.

That is why we report what we collect, what we sort and what we spend — and then adjust. Numbers without follow-through are just decoration, and a pledge without a way to check it is only a slogan.

There is one measure we cannot take without you. Download and print a LOVE DOLORES sign, write your own definition of a successful park on it, take a photo of yourself holding it, and post it with #lovedolores and #dolorespark — or upload it straight to the Love Dolores Gallery.

Images appear in the gallery within 24 hours. By uploading a photo you are pledging to Love Dolores Park as best you can, and you are giving us permission to share the picture together with your caption. Keep files small — around 600 pixels wide by 720 pixels tall is ideal, at 72 dpi.

Where the score is kept

Want to help move the numbers the right way? Join us on a Community Day, read the Park Guide before your next picnic so you arrive with reusables and leave with your own bag of recycling, and see the mission behind all of it. Community organisations and neighbourhood businesses who want to be part of the count are listed on our partners page — and you can always get in touch with a question or a better idea for how we should measure this park. By the time another summer ends, the grass should be a little cleaner, the bins a little emptier and the crowd a little wiser. That is what a success looks like here.