“So, what do you do?”

As the summer social season approaches, this common question will soon be making the rounds of backyard barbecues, tables of wedding guests, and golf foursomes around the country. Park and recreation professionals may think they have an easy and quick answer to that question. But do they?

“We train staff constantly on this stuff….This is a topic all the time,” says Greg Petry, executive director of the Waukegan Park District near Chicago. “Training the staff so they have the ability to articulate what we’re all about, how we benefit the community, what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, what are the outcomes of what we’re doing.”

The need to reframe the conversation about parks and recreation away from “What do you do?” to “What impact do you have?” has led to the development of NRPA’s three pillars—conservation, health and wellness, and social equity. Whether you call them “themes,” “values,” or “positions,” these three pillars encapsulate the work of 100,000 professionals running tens of thousands of widely different programs and facilities. In the world of literature, a famous writing challenge is to write a story in only six words. These six words—conservation, health and wellness, social equity—hold the story of an entire field working in thousands of communities and touching the lives of millions of people.

Conservation
“Many people are surprised to learn that San Diego County is one of Earth’s 20 biodiversity hotspots,” says Brian Albright, director of San Diego County Parks and Recreation. “The county contains a greater number and variety of species than any similar-sized area in North America.”

To preserve this special ecosystem, the county developed the Multiple Species Conservation Program (MSCP) that will eventually conserve more than 200,000 acres of sensitive habitat. The MSCP also provides a platform to help cultivate future environmental stewards. Using a curriculum that correlates to the California Science Framework Standards, the county’s Discovery Program begins with specialized training for teachers and visits to school classrooms by park rangers, followed up by field trips to various parks throughout the county. Each park has its own unique focus area, be it forest ecology, geology, Native American history, and other science concepts. Recently, through the help of donors and sponsors that provide transportation, the county has increased the focus of Discovery on inner-city schools.

“These urban locations are where the gap between kids and nature tends to be the greatest,” Albright says. “Remarkably, for some of these kids, the Discovery field trip is their first hands-on experience with real nature.”

“Sustainable environments” is an overarching theme for the department, so two of its operational priorities include making optimal use of two important resources: sunshine and water. Whether it’s water conservation efforts that have saved 650 million gallons in five years or photovoltaics located on rooftops, car ports, and even compacting trash cans, the county parks department leads by example.

“The drive to conserve is pervasive—and there is so much more we can do,” Albright says. “Our team is constantly thinking of more ways to innovate in this area, and we aren’t afraid to copy the best practices of other agencies that we see or hear about.”

NRPA’s three-pillar messaging strikes a chord with Albright.

“In San Diego County, three initiatives guide all programs and services,” he says. “They are: safe communities, sustainable environments, and healthy families. Look at how closely those initiatives mirror the three pillars of NRPA!”

He continues, “In the past, our industry’s message got lost in too many specific goals and directives. The three pillars help clarify and simplify the message into something we can share even though our agencies serve unique individual communities. Hopefully that will drive funding, policies, and behaviors that will benefit all of us.”

Health & Wellness
“Recreation that inspires personal growth, healthy lifestyles, and a sense of community” is one of the themes of the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board’s (MPRB) 2007-2020 Comprehensive Plan, which, along with the mission, guides the board’s annual budget goals and day-to-day operations. That theme is evident in several recent collaborations and partnerships.

“In 2010, the MPRB began an exciting new research partnership with the University of Minnesota to investigate the outdoor leisure time activity needs of different family types and the impact of neighborhood park design on family health and well-being,” says Superintendent Jayne Miller. “Research was conducted in some of the most diverse, economically challenged neighborhoods within the city.”

The MPRB is also one of six organizations in the new “HealthyLiving Minneapolis” program, a network of Minneapolis organizations that provide accessible and affordable programs and services for healthy eating, physical activity, and tobacco cessation. And a new urban agriculture plan, to be drafted and released for public review this spring, will help define and prioritize community needs, recommend service delivery goals, and guide allocation of resources to support urban agriculture within the park system. The MPRB is also developing a Healthy Food Policy to provide residents and park users, particularly youth, with increased access to healthy food. The policy, which is expected to be adopted in 2013, will result in a healthier food environment for youth and adult programming, community meetings and events, concessions, and vending machines.

“The three-pillar messaging reflects the park and recreation profession’s commitment to how we serve the community and improve the quality of life within our community,” Miller says. “We are stewards of the public lands we manage, and we are community servants obligated to deliver programs and services that meet the needs of our community.”

The concept of organizing an agency’s programs and facilities under a small number of themes is familiar territory for Ronnie Gathers, director of the Prince George’s County Department of Parks and Recreation, part of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. Gathers had previously referred to his agency’s efforts as building on six cornerstones: health and wellness, community building (social equity), education, public safety, conservation, and economic development.

“When NRPA came out with the pillars last year, it was a great opportunity to link what our message has been with the national message and deliver that message to our staff,” Gathers says.

The staff’s embrace of the three pillars was on display at a recent staff gathering where 13 division chiefs wore T-shirts that read either “conservation,” “health and wellness,” or “social equity” while they performed a stepping routine, recognizing the launch of a new stepping program at six community centers.

Health and wellness permeates many programs, and as part of its Formula 2040 planning process, the agency recently set a goal that 75 percent of all programs will have a health and wellness component. Gathers sees the potential in the three-pillar messaging strategy.

“On each one of those pillars, you can delve deeper into practically anything that we do,” he says. “And so it has been very instrumental to us to have the national association behind it—that we can point to it as a national standard. It makes it easier as a selling point….What does it mean for us as a profession? It takes us from programing for fun to more intentional programming—results-based programming. We’re doing a program with a purpose in mind, whether it’s to affect health, raise awareness around conservation and build our stewards for the next generation, or provide social equity and community building.”

Social Equity
Maintaining social equity across programs and facilities is difficult enough in communities with stable demographics. But when communities rapidly change, park and recreation agencies must change how they do business in order to keep up. Greg Petry, executive director of the Waukegan Park District in Illinois, explains how this Chicago suburb went from five to 60 percent Hispanic in just 25 years. The park district now includes a smaller population of long-time white residents and a far-from-homogeneous mix of various Latin American cultures.

“The challenge is, how do we meet the needs of everyone in such a diverse environment?” Petry says. “One of our philosophies that we’ve taken on strategically is we said that there’s going to be something for everybody at the park district—that goes from the programs to the facilities we develop to the special events we have.”

For example, one strategy to increase the accessibility of programs came from a simple observation: Many Hispanic families are only free to get together on Sundays, so each week on Sunday, park usage surged. Now more programming is offered on weekends to accommodate when families can participate.

A critical test of the agency’s commitment to social equity came when the agency decided to convert an underused golf course into a new sports park to provide badly needed soccer fields.

“If you go back to our mission statement, it talks about us responding to an evolving community,” Petry says. “We stood firm in our beliefs, and we did what was the right thing to do.

“We have to focus on how we are serving the community,” Petry continues. “NRPA is key to help agencies position themselves—taking this big-picture philosophy where NRPA can help with the framework and guidance, and having the individual agencies utilize this information and demonstrate some quantifiable individual results….Agencies just have to embrace it and use them.”

In Los Angeles, social equity is manifest in both programming and facilities.

“Our mission is not just for those who can pay,” says Kevin Regan, assistant general manager of the Recreation Operations Branch, Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks. “If you didn’t think about equity, you could really fall into a system of the haves and the have nots.”

L.A.’s 50 Parks Initiative is having a historic impact on social equity in the city’s neighborhoods.

“When we talk about equity, it’s not just the quality of parks or the quality of the programs, it’s the number of parks—so that’s how the 50 Parks Initiative came into being. The fact is, we have plenty of parkland per thousand residents in L.A,” says General Manager Jon Kirk Mukri. “The problem we have is access. So we have the parkland, but are the parks where the people are?”

Well before the “red fields to green fields” concept of turning economically distressed properties into parkland or open space became prominent, Los Angeles was already buying up rundown housing and contaminated properties for use as potential parkland in neighborhoods with the most need for parks, according to Mike Shull, assistant general manager of the Planning, Construction, and Maintenance Branch. A community-needs assessment in 2009 revealed exactly which areas were most in need of more parkland.

“One of the top five priorities was that they simply wanted more parks closer to their neighborhoods,” says Shull. “A simple park with a playground makes a world of difference.”

L.A.’s 50 Parks Initiative actually includes 61 potential sites, and so far, 13 parks have opened and 10 more are under construction. Shull notes that social-equity messaging was crucial to forming the partnerships with nonprofit organizations and winning the grants that are funding the 50 Parks effort, with $100 million raised so far.

“We talked a lot about social equity—I wasn’t telling them anything that they didn’t already know. It was an easy message, and quite frankly, a lot of the grant funding that we got demanded it,” Shull explains.

The idea of park and recreation agencies uniting under the three-pillar messaging brings an enthusiastic response in L.A.

“I wish I had thought of those pillars myself—to be honest with you, we already embrace those. Those are embedded in our programs,” Mukri says. “I think that’s one of the centralized, unifying programs that we should adopt as our platform within all the membership of NRPA. It covers every aspect we in recreation and parks are trying to do every single day.”


Q&A
Steve Thompson, chair of the NRPA Board of Directors, and Barbara Tulipane, NRPA president and CEO, discuss how the pillars were developed and what they can do to help NRPA, its member agencies, and the field of parks and recreation.

Why do we need pillars? How are they going to help the field?
Tulipane: When you talk about park and recreation services and how they shape and build communities, you can get lost in your own story because we do so much. It almost can be overwhelming trying to explain everything. These are the three positions that our members hold as essential that nobody else can claim, and I think that’s what makes us unique and distinct. We didn’t set out to say, “Okay, what are our pillars?” It was really to try to simplify our messaging about what we hold true and we stand behind.

How were the pillars developed?
Thompson: Although the concept of the three pillars of NRPA has been ingrained in the very fabric of what NRPA has long stood for, it wasn’t until 2012 that both the NRPA Board and staff developed position papers based on conservation, health and wellness, and social equity. This provides a very clear message to our elected officials and to our membership so that proper recognition of the impact that parks and recreation has on communities can be better understood. With these three pillars (values) as the focus of our efforts, NRPA continues to strive to ensure the best-possible support for its more than 30,000 members in meeting the diverse needs of their communities and to bring about long-lasting and positive change.

Why these three pillars?
Tulipane: We could have talked about things like recreation programs, fitness, climate change, or stormwater management. But what we really tried to look at is, where do we have the impact? We need to get away from talking about our laundry list of things we do and really focus more on the impact that we make. Yes, we manage stormwater and floodplains, but really that’s all about conserving natural resources. You could talk about all of the fitness programs we do, but at the end of the day we’re helping communities be healthy and well. And you could explain how parks are a level playing field open to all, or you could really talk about social equity. Again, it was more about the impact and less about the laundry list.

How do the pillars help communicate the impact of parks and recreation on their communities?
Thompson: In the conservation pillar, our parks are critically important in preserving natural resources that have quantifiable economic benefits to our communities. Oftentimes, our park and recreation agencies are the only voice for ensuring that open space is protected, that our youth have access to nature-related areas, and that services and outdoor education are available.

In the health and wellness pillar, our park and recreation agencies have finally been recognized as the leaders in improving and enhancing health and wellness in their respective communities. We are actively engaged in reducing obesity, physical inactivity, and poor nutrition.

In the social equity pillar, our agencies have embraced complete access to their park and recreation services and facilities. Park and recreation agencies strive to be a catalyst for ensuring that all residents have equal access to their resources and services.

How is NRPA going to be using the pillars?
Tulipane: This past Legislative Forum, I met with the Department of the Interior and the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. It was the first time I was able to share with them these pillars, and they got it—it just simplified it. I could say that these are the three areas where parks and recreation make the most impact, and they could picture these three buckets, if you will. It was like a light bulb went on, and they asked a lot of questions about whether we could give data on those three areas. We are going to continue to use it that way in our messaging, because I think it resonates with legislators and with regulators, and we hope that it will also resonate with funders.

How were the pillars used in developing NRPA’s next strategic plan?
Thompson: When the FY 2014–2016 Strategic Plan was first being formulated, we quickly determined that NRPA’s three pillars needed to be the focus of the next three-year plan. In fact, the entire framework of the recently adopted Strategic Plan is guided by conservation, health and wellness, and social equity. The three pillars and the subsequent goals will equip our members with the tools to increase the impact of parks and recreation in these value areas. The adopted 2014–2016 Strategic Plan has been well received by the NRPA Networks and membership, and has been captured in a comprehensive one-page strategic map (see www.nrpa.org/strategic_plan).

How will our members use the pillars?
Tulipane: In the magazine, members will get a poster each quarter that will talk about one of the pillars. We’re hoping that they will start to group their offerings under these three banners and start talking to their community more about the impact they’re making and less about their list of programs.

One great example suggested by Board Member Becky Benna was “What if, under the banner of conservation, we could get all of our park and rec agencies to agree to ban bottled water or plastic bags in their parks?” When we can get park and rec agencies to agree on one thing and all do it together, that creates a movement. That’s been really difficult for NRPA to do. Hopefully, under these banners, we can do programs like that. That’s when the public is going to sit up and take notice—when we come together.

One thing I have found in this industry is that everyone prides themselves on how unique their community is. However, I think we need to look at commonalities where we could be stronger together. Until we do that, we will always have separate identities. For example, look at the YMCA—they have a brand. You say “the Y” and everyone thinks, “Okay, I know what that looks like.” If we could get park and rec agencies to agree on a message, then I think we would have a much more powerful voice.

So what is the take-home message?
Tulipane: How do we get the average person to recognize how critical parks and recreation are to communities? We need to change the way we talk about it. One of the things that organizations like Walmart and the CDC like about us is that we have a reach in every community. But we don’t use it to benefit ourselves. Let’s agree that we’re going to focus on these three things and really drive the message home. We have lots of resources, like the posters, here at NRPA for people to learn more about these positions. And we want to hear from members about their ideas. We are the first to admit we don’t have all of the answers. If there’s a pillar that you think we’ve missed, let us know! If we can get our agencies to all chant the same mantra, that’s how we’re going to change public opinion. It would be a powerful event.

Elizabeth Beardis Managing Editor of Parks & Recreation.