Telling Park & Rec’s Story By Seve Ghose, CPRE, Director, Thornton Parks, Recreation & Community Programs
The Parks and Recreation profession is at a crossroads, especially more pronounced under COVID-19, as it relates to relevancy. The pandemic has created greater use of our parks, with numbers four times the normal in many cities. Most recreation centers and related programming has been closed and only slowly beginning to get traction, if open. That too in only a few States. The non-surety and the prolonged crisis has resulted in economic hardship across the board and is requiring municipalities and park districts to make difficult decisions. Parks and recreation is still looked upon as a luxury and not a necessity in many quarters and it is up to us to place ourselves in the limelight to showcase and relate the reasons why we are essential and fully relevant to the times. Before we do that in unison, we have to overcome several tenets that tend to hold us back and make ourselves our own worst enemy. Some of these factors are Succession Planning, Bold Leadership, Innovation (or the lack of it), Understanding
Finances, and Story Telling. We usually live for the day and thus succession planning is an after-thought. We should not look at succession planning as just a personnel issue but rather how do we extract the valuable information from a departing staff members’ head and put into practice to benefit a greater number in the organization. One solution may be to create a job shadow program whereby all layers of staff in the organization is required to complete two shadows each year. Doing so earns them knowledge of the other sectors while also breaking down the silos or related barriers that may inherently exist. Succession planning should include the movement away from “We have always done it that way” mantra into one of being welcoming of new ideas and embracing change as a necessity of growth. One issue outside of the agency’s control is the rate at which several universities across the nation have dropped the parks
and recreation degree program. Thirty five years ago there were close to four hundred universities offering a bachelor’s degree in parks and recreation or a very closely related field. Now there are barely a hundred and we may be partly to blame in not cultivating a better synergy between the universities and the profession. In the Denver area recently, Metro State University announced the cancellation of the Recreation Administration program with immediate effect, after having given it a brief lifeline the prior year. Thus in Colorado, there is only one other university left, offering a close enough program to our profession. What this dearth creates is for us to hire staff who may be partially qualified and then having to spend much time and resources in imparting the hands-on knowledge, whereas a qualified professional would have run with the program. It may be an option for us as professionals, along with the CPRA and NRPA, and other partners, to raise enough
Colorado Byline | Fall 2020 • 11
