January 2011 - Parks & Recreation - 30

Who, What, Where & how Around the Parks

L E A D E RSHI P E X C H A N G E

A Crisis of Knowledge
Until we educate our communities on the essential nature
of parks and recreation, we will be sentenced to a
downward spiral of declining resources and support.
By Tom Lovell

A

s I read the articles by
Paul Gilbert and Mike
McCarty in the September and October issues of
Parks & Recreation, it was
refreshing to see more practitioner dialogue in our publication. It is crucial that
our practitioners engage in the discussions that will shape our future. 
To the point of the two articles, we
are a profession under a silent siege as
the economy forces our elected officials
to make decisions that are rarely based
on the long- or short-term cost-benefit
analysis of competing interests. This is,
however, through no fault of the elected officials. The magnitude of their ignorance is only rivaled by our own. My
good friend and comrade in arms on
this subject, Barry Weiss, characterizes it best with his quote of Albert Einstein: " Insanity is doing the same thing
over and over but expecting a different
result. " I mean no disrespect, but until
we fundamentally change our model of
" doing business " to garner resources at
all levels of government to serve all people- we will always be at the end of the
line, or maybe not in line at all.
My read of the two articles was enjoyable, though it seemed like " back to the
future. " Those of us who experienced
the last few economic downturns felt the
same pressures as today. Our response,
as suggested by the authors, is the same:
do more with less and be more aggressive and entrepreneurial in our approach
to service delivery. And we are. 
A strong current runs through our
profession now that is representative

28	 Parks & Recreation

JANUARY 2011

Tom Lovell

of a business approach to our development and management of facilities
and services. This is a critical aspect
of our operations today and in the competitive marketplace of parks and recreation it is essential to maintaining our
market share.
But there is another critical aspect
of our services that entails access. All
of our citizens, regardless of economic status or physical/mental ability, deserve access to these services and
facilities. It becomes even more important that resources can be obtained
that ensure this access by all. The argument/data for this must be strong
enough that it, too, becomes a part of
the business model that we use to obtain our resources.
But it is not working for the long

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term. Some of us are not being asked
to do more with less but to do less with
less. An article in the September 2010
issue of Governing magazine, " Doing
Less with Less, " chronicles a troubling
situation in Colorado Springs where an
excellent parks and recreation system
operated as a best practice system is
being decimated. This is not a situation
of staff working harder or being more
entrepreneurial- it is ignorance on the
part of the citizens and elected officials
in their decision making.  To counter
such situations, we must immediately begin repositioning our field in terms of the
tangible values and benefits of a strong
parks and recreation system.
As the late accreditation expert Betty
van der Smissen so aptly put it several years ago during my department's
first accreditation review, " We must become the teachers and interpreters of
the values and benefits of what we do
or we will perish. " This is not, as last
fall's column on Viking strategies suggested, just a matter of being more entrepreneurial or more aggressive in
the market place. It is simply about the
people we serve and the people they
elect having a solid understanding of
the compelling " tangible values and
benefits " provided by a strong parks
and recreation system. 
We should all feel a sense of urgency to address this crisis. We are the only
ones to fix it. Our students should graduate knowing hundreds of metric-based
benefits to make the case for essentiality. Our own practitioners should know
hundreds of metric-based benefits to
January 2011 - Parks & Recreation

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