A new pocket park in Maple Valley is in its final stages of development and may finally come to fruition after many years of planning and designing. The last hurdle the project has is funding.

The Maple Valley Creative Arts Council, a nonprofit founded in 1998, launched a Kickstarter project at the beginning of December to fund the park. They have until the end of the month to raise $43,000 to make the highly anticipated pocket park a reality.

If fully funded, the park will be located between QFC and Starbucks. Right now, that area is an unused alley about 23 feet wide and 65 feet long.

The park will feature a stage for local performers to showcase their artistic abilities, a hopscotch game, natural seating areas, a labyrinth path, mosaic game boards and a self-sustaining rain garden.

And that’s just phase one of the project.

Phase two, which will be donated by the architects, contractors and engineers that are working on the Tahoma High School project, will include some artistic metal banners for the wall and a canopy so that the park can be used year-round.

The process to bring the park to Maple Valley ramped up in 2011 when the council received a $5,000 grant from 4Culture, the cultural services agency for King County. The next year, they received the same grant, but for $4,500.

Now, they have $25,000 going toward the park, including donations from the city, QFC and other private donors. Another contribution to the project will come from the county. King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn succeeded in getting a $5,000 appropriation for the Creative Arts Council from the 2015-2016 budget. But, the Creative Arts Council still needs $43,000 from the community to complete the park.

“It’s very exciting, but it’s also daunting,” said Mary Jane Glaser, president of the Creative Arts Council. “Our organization has never run a Kickstarter campaign before. To raise $43,000 in 30 days is a daunting task.”

With a Kickstarter fund, if the project does not collect all of the money it sets out to raise, then none of it will be collected.

“It’s all or nothing,” Glaser said.

Glaser said one of the council’s goals with the project is to invite different ethnic groups to use the park as a gathering place.

Glaser, who is also the president of the Tahoma School Board, said there are 37 languages spoken as a first language in the Tahoma school system.

“This pocket park would be a way to honor our diversity in our community,” she said.

Local artist, Kathleen Frugé-Brown designed the pocket park.

The park, which will still be owned by QFC even once it’s complete, will be maintained by the Creative Arts Council. It may be the first park in Maple Valley to be located in a commercial area of town and it is highly welcomed by the city.

Greg Brown, parks and recreation director for the city, said this type of park is exactly what the city should be looking at building in the future.

“We need to start thinking about parks in commercial places,” he said. “We think of built environments as gray. They are non-exuberant and kind of bland. If we can blend those two (‘green-scapes’ and ‘gray-scapes’), that’s what brightens up those gray areas,” he said.

The Kickstarter project page can be accessed through the Creative Arts Council’s website at www.maplevalleyarts.com. Because the Creative Arts Council is a 501(c)3 non profit, donations to the organization and the project are tax-deductible.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the project had raised $3,238 of the $43,000 goal.