Ankored and CivicPlus Partner to Help Parks and Recreation Directors Protect Kids
Partnership gives directors a simplified way to track background-checked coaches and verified volunteers, helping improve compliance rates and protecting youth participants.
To learn more, visit [ankored.com/civicplus], contact the Ankored team, or join our free webinar Compliance is Table Stakes: What Parks and Recreation Leaders Need to Know in 2026.
[Issued over the wire May 19th, 2026. See original release here.]
Ankored, the athlete safety and compliance platform for youth sports and parks and recreation organizations, today announced a partnership with CivicPlus®, a public sector SaaS leader. The two companies will work together to help parks and recreation program directors keep kids safe by simplifying the process of clearing staff, coaches, and volunteers to work with youth.
Parks and recreation directors run a broad range of youth programs on tight budgets, often with small teams. Most still use a spreadsheet and email threads to track background checks, safety training certifications, and other health forms and waivers. With state and program-specific compliance requirements evolving rapidly, staying on top of what’s needed and who's cleared is becoming more complex. When a certification lapses mid-session or a background check goes stale, directors often find out too late, which increases the risk for youth in their care as well as the organization.
Through the partnership, CivicPlus Recreation Management customers gain a unified view of compliance status through Ankored for every coach and volunteer. Alongside the activity, registration, and communications tools in Recreation Management, directors now have a comprehensive way to manage programming while protecting what matters most: the kids.
"Parks and recreation directors tell us the same thing every week," said Seth Lieberman, CEO of Ankored. "First, keeping kids safe is mission-critical to their community, and second, staying on top of compliance requirements is really hard and time-consuming administrative work. With this partnership, Ankored and CivicPlus will massively reduce that administrative burden, ultimately helping keep more kids safe."
CivicPlus works with more than 13,000 local government agencies. CivicPlus Recreation Management supports activity registration, facility reservations, and day-to-day operations for parks and recreation departments across the country, while Ankored gives directors one more piece of the job handled: compliance they can trust.
"Our parks and recreation customers are asked to overcome the perpetual tradeoff between the demand for better services and the realities of few operational resources. Compliance is one of the places where the risk is highest, and the tools are thinnest," said Taylor Willardson, Senior Director of Product Management for CivicPlus. “Our goal with this partnership is to help reduce our customers’ workload, allowing them to focus on delivering impactful resident programs.”
CivicPlus Parks and Recreation customers can begin working with Ankored today. To learn more, visit [ankored.com/civicplus], contact the Ankored team, or join our free webinar Compliance is Table Stakes: What Parks and Recreation Leaders Need to Know in 2026.
About Ankored
At Ankored, we simplify how youth sports organizations keep players safe and manage risk, so they can focus more on the game. With a connected ecosystem for registration, background checks, training, and more, organizations gain a unified view of their safety-related information. Less Paper. More Play. Ankored is HIPAA and SOC 2-compliant and headquartered in Boston, MA. Learn more at ankored.com.
About CivicPlus
Thousands of high-performing civic leaders rely on CivicPlus® as their trusted partner for impact-led government. With CivicPlus, leaders can finally overcome the perpetual tradeoff between the demand for better services and the realities of operational resources, leveraging the unique Civic Impact Platform to deliver both unmatched end-to-end automated efficiency and truly unified, delightful resident experiences.
Backed by over 25 years of experience and leveraging the insights of more than 950 team members, our solutions are chosen by over 13,000 organizations and are used daily by over 340 million people in the U.S. and Canada. For more information, please visit civicplus.com.