Tapping Into TR Trends

Trend: Greater User Awareness

In her Brooklyn Park programs Bonikowske has seen a growing understanding of the inclusion services that are rightfully available to participants and their families.

As participants register online for Brooklyn Park’s programs, they’re prompted to answer questions surrounding allergies, medications, and inclusive services needed. “More and more of our participants are identifying their own needs and feeling comfortable requesting inclusion services,” she says.

“As we get better about reaching into community, there’s a greater awareness of the services that are available and an easing of the stigma that may be associated with having a disability.”

Trend: Word of Mouth Still Holds Weight

While Bonikowske and her team regularly promote the city’s adaptive and inclusion services through core community touchpoints, she’s found word of mouth holds the power to help participants realize the services’ full potential.

After one local family’s underwhelming experience with Brooklyn Park’s ice skating program, Bonikowske worked closely with the participants to ensure they had a positive experience with their inclusion support.

“They ultimately had an extremely successful, positive experiences, and it was one they made sure to share. We went from having no participants for inclusion services in this program to seven with the encouragement this one family, and we’ve seen that time and again.”

Trend: Accessibility in Aquatics

Whether helping those with cognitive abilities gain familiarity and confidence in the water or offering a low-stress, low-impact, musclebuilding pathway for injured participants or aging seniors, aquatics offer the ultimate setting for adaptive programming.

For Lamey’s team at The Rookery, aquatic programming have become a fast fan favorite, with steadily growing participation from the center’s most senior members. The center already offers a robust aquatic program in its 6-lane lap pool, but the Center’s zero-depth entry splash pool, featuring a waterslide and water feature has become a hit.

“You might traditionally think this feature would be for kids, but the water is a bit warmer and shallower and we’re finding a lot of seniors enjoy water walking or taking space to move there. We added our aquatics program a few months after we opened and it’s already become one of our most popular offerings because it works so well,” Lamey says.

Identifying Collaborative Community Partners

While The Rookery does not have its own inclusion specialists on staff, Lamey and her team partner regularly with fellow community organizations like SwimPossible to lend their facilities to groups seeking adaptive activities.

“We may not have the in-house expertise to be able to lead a physical therapy-focused group or a group with cognitive disabilities through a very carefully curated program, but we can at least provide the space these groups need to execute these programs in a therapeutic environment and collaborate to ensure the experience accomplishes their goals,” Lamey says.

Her team works closely with each group to understand the activities planned, the adaptations needed, coordinate any adaptive equipment that needs to be brought in.

Training an Inclusive Staff

In addition to her coordination with program planners across Brooklyn Park’s recreation department, Bonikowske also curates an inclusive staff training for all instructors and mentors a smaller team of inclusion specialists, who are available to provide more focused, one-on-one support to participants who need more personalized care.

“We work hard to ensure our entire staff has an understanding of inclusion-specific topics alongside some of those more basic safety components like allergy care or EpiPen administration. The goal is to help teach them how to observe and take note of what it might look like for a participant to need additional support in their program,” she says. “We want staff to be able to identify the need and connect families to services.”

Building Your Skills

While professionals trained in therapeutic recreation build their expertise through advanced education and a certification process through the National Council for Therapeutic Recreation Certification (NCTRC), your team can wade and build a baseline understanding of core TR skills and concepts through a variety of local courses.

Minnesota State University, Mankato

Within Mankato’s Department of Recreation, Parks, and Leadership Studies, two key courses can help students grasp the fundamentals of program planning and execution through a therapeutic recreational lens.

Program Planning

Led by assistant professor Michelle Margo, M.A., the program planning course helps students learn how to think through each phase of the program planning process with therapeutic recreation principles in mind — accounting and adapting for all ages, gender identities, races and abilities — from inception of an initial idea up through completion.

“This class is really about embracing those building blocks of building a program or service with an adaptive mindset,” says Margo. “As a planner or coordinator, you have to be able to look at a situation and say ‘How can I modify this for those who are all coming at this with different strengths and different needs? How do I start to build an understanding of those needs so I can adapt for them?’ It’s all about preparing you to see through multiple lenses and being prepared to build around that.”

Margo’s course covers a mix of concept review and experiential learning, including live program immersion to gain practical experience problem-solving in real time.

TR Techniques

In this hands-on advanced course led by James Wise, Ph.D., students learn how to apply interventions and facilitation techniques to prepare professionals to implement programs for a variety of special needs. Each student gains experience facilitating multiple therapeutic programs for their peers, practices receiving and incorporating feedback, and executing those programs for community members with disabilities.

“We want to prepare students to act as a consultative partner within their local park or rec facility,” says Wise. “When a participant comes in with a particular challenge —whether that’s a cognitive disability or a broken leg or poor eyesight—we’re preparing students to be able to say ‘You sound like a candidate for therapeutic rec. Let’s figure out some alternatives.”

University of Wisconsin – Lacrosse

With a dedicated independent major focused on therapeutic recreation, there are plenty of options to choose from for those interested in exploring TR applications, but associate teaching professor Tara Delong’s Therapeutic Recreation and Mental Health course, focuses on learning to provide therapeutic interventions for those with mental illness, substance abuse disorders or those needing behavior health support.

“The theme of the course is compassion and the goal is centered in understanding what it means to be struggling with a mental health issue and how that understanding can help TR specialists build out solutions that can improve mental wellbeing over time,” Delong says.

Through the course students unpack the differences between mental illness and mental health, how trauma can inform how participants respond to therapies and trauma-informed practices. Experiential learning is a key component of the course as well. Students are led through exercises that help examine the stigmas and biases they face in their own lives, attend recovery meetings, and more to draw connections from as they learn how to craft solutions to improve mental health.

“My philosophy is to give students the opportunity to have ‘aha’ moments of reflection and understand, not just what it means to be impacted by mental illness, but what does it look like to harness that understanding to build services that foster better mental wellbeing?”