Features
Skills-Based Volunteering
Laura Toscano is Manager of Professional Skilled Volunteering for the Washington, D.C. volunteer placement nonprofit HandsOn Greater DC Cares. In this brief interview she describes the pro bono volunteering groundswell among Boomers--a trend that is changing the image of service "from the soup kitchen to the board room."
Pro Bono Boomers
Americans currently between the ages of 50 and 65 represent a wealth of educational and business achievements—their careers have spanned technological changes more rapid and sweeping any generation before them. Not surprisingly, this is a generation that seeks to give back through skills-based volunteering.
Rejuvenating the Senior Center
Café-like settings top Boomers' senior-center wish lists. Other growth areas in the new, more active senior centers include physical wellness facilities, such as fitness equipment rooms, exercise and dance studios, pools, and gymnasiums. Ideally, this indoor recreation is complemented by adjacent parkland with outdoor recreation opportunities such as walking trails, community gardens, athletic fields and courts, and picnic areas.
Boom A Generation Explodes Assumptions About Aging
Regardless of whether the big drawing card in a community is a café-like social center or citywide teaching and learning opportunities, the new senior center is being defined by a set of hard-to-ignore demographic themes.
Additional Articles
This Much We Know
I have always been reluctant to get too wrapped up in generalizing about age groups. Too often we run the risk of being flat-out wrong, insulting, or both. But, when a demographic tidal wave of 72 million enters its retirement years, it’s just too large to ignore. This is especially true for the field of parks and recreation.
Pedal Power
Bike Month, sponsored by the League of American Bicyclists, is a nationally recognized event celebrated each May—with Bike to Work Day taking place on the third Friday of the month.
Skate Park Vandalism
Sometimes you have to clean up other people’s messes. It’s a fact of life that park professionals understand all too well. But municipal agencies addressing skate park vandalism often find cleaning up that particular kind of mess is a complicated endeavor.
Learn and Grow with NRPA
Upcoming educational opportunities to take your knowledge to the next level.
Are Seniors a Core Target Audience for Your Programs and Services
Where once retirement defined one as a senior, it’s not uncommon now to see 55-year-old retirees and 70-year-olds still working. Data collected from park agencies around the country offers insights into how park agencies are serving this new senior demographic.
Risk Management
Risk management, like many other core competencies needed by a parks and recreation professional, is a discipline unto itself, and a host of resources is available to help develop this competency--if you know where to look.
Parks Are Green Infrastructure
Cities, counties, regions, and states are increasingly looking at the functions of their “green infrastructure” and the benefits it provides to citizens and taxpayers. Once taken for granted, the interconnected web of forests, streams, rivers, wetlands, and other natural systems that is woven into every community is suddenly being recognized as extremely important to economic and environmental health.
Festival Policy Silences Annoying Preaching
The First Amendment prohibits the suppression of free speech activities by government. Further, when private individuals or groups are involved, there must be a sufficient degree of governmental involvement to establish the necessary “state action” to trigger First Amendment protection. Such constitutional protection for individuals and groups, however, is not absolute. Free speech activities are still subject to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions by government. Moreover, public parks are considered the “quintessential” public forums in which individuals and groups have traditionally engaged in free speech activities.
Rolling Along or Just Spinning
This year’s National Legislative Forum in March coincided with the extraordinary debate over federal transportation policy on Capitol Hill. Both the House and Senate made passage of a new surface transportation bill a priority. But was all this activity a sign of real momentum, or is it another example of Congress simply spinning its wheels?
Janet Clarke
A local elected official in Loudoun County, Virginia, pushes competing park supporters to find common ground.
Briefly Noted
News, milestones, publications, and awards relevant to the parks and recreation field.
Richard Florida
Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, is a long-time observer of public spaces--and he writes about the factors that cause people to love where they live. In our shift from an industrial- to a knowledge-based economy, he contends, abundant, walkable, “serendipitous” public spaces have come to represent the new gold standard of community attractiveness. “A park is not a frivolity.”
The New Normal How the City of Clearwater Develops Public Private Partnerships
The New Normal. Paradigm Shift. These two phrases are now essential everyday language, but what do they mean--economically speaking--to parks and recreation? Felicia Leonard, Administrative Support Manager in Clearwater, Florida, explains the paradigm shift that has transformed the city from a recreation service provider to a service facilitator for specific programs
Ace High in Houston
Launched more than three years ago, Reading Aces is a nonprofit after-school literacy program founded by a high school student. Brette Machiorlette and her team of high school volunteers visit various Houston-area parks and recreation centers loaded with picture books and snacks. These teen volunteers work shoulder-to-shoulder with elementary students and help foster a love of books through the magic of oral reading.
California Forever
When they read about a proposal in the middle of the last decade to build a six-lane toll road through San Onofre State Park in Orange County, California, documentary filmmakers David Vassar and Sally Kaplan set out to produce a film showcasing “the priceless legacy that state parks protect and to celebrate the individual citizens who worked so hard to preserve them.”
Pennsylvania Park Recreation and Conservation Fund under Attack
Yet another state is threatened with loss of critical funding for parks. The impending elimination of the Pennsylvania's Keystone Fund has stunned parks and conservation advocates in that state. Proponents of the fund have mounted an aggressive statewide effort to mobilize public opposition to this planned budget cut.
65 and Up
The number of Americans 65 and older is growing--and so is the number of fall-related injuries each year. Is there an antidote? According to national statistics, there just might be--and it's one that parks provide for free.
A Mighty Confluence
For most people, mention of the San Antonio River brings to mind images of a bustling, urban tourist destination. The San Antonio River, however, is not an artificial channel created solely for tourism--it is a natural river that extends more than 200 miles beyond the city. The San Antonio River Authority is trying to change perceptions through several innovative projects.
National Recreation Foundation Spotlight
As part of an ongoing series on the National Recreation Foundation, Parks & Recreation highlights grant recipients for the foundation’s program benefiting at-risk youths. This month features programs from Texas.
If You Want to Go Far
NRPA Board Chair Bob Johnson describes a series of conversations in March and early April with NRPA members all over the country. Despite the challenges facing parks everywhere, Johnson found "nothing but optimism about how we can accomplish our mission, together."
NRPA Legislative Forum 2012
At the recent NRPA 2012 Legislative Forum, more than 230 delegates from 45 states and the District of Columbia gathered in Washington, D.C., to advocate for a common agenda for parks and recreation funding, learn about current national legislative issues, share facts and data to support the value of parks and recreation, and network with fellow professionals and park advocates.
Greg A Weitzel
Parks and recreation professionals constitute a national brain trust that our legislators sorely need, NRPA advocacy volunteer Greg Weitzel insists—a brain trust with the potential to shape the future of parks in this country.