July 2013 - Parks & Recreation - 53

which took me into the mountains.
I've always been an outdoorsy person and for me, the fun part is that
this overlaps with some of the client
work we've done. [Recreation is a]
personal passion and just how I think
of myself as individual.
What are some trends you're seeing
that may affect the field of parks
and recreation?
We did research following the recession, when it was darker probably in
2008 or 2009, and one of the things
that happened from people going
through that period is that they started really thinking about what would
be important for them and why. It
used to be that everything was career,
career, career, but then as people (the
Boomers) started approaching retirement, they think, " Hey, what's really
important in life? " Over the last three
to five years, people started reprioritizing. The areas that started getting
more interest included pursuing life
to its fullest (which isn't just about
your career), ensuring that you have
enough time with your family and
travel. We now have a consumer psyche where people are more interested
in trying new things or types of adventure that they never had. All three
interests overlap with what happens
in the world of parks and rec. And
in the current economic times, a park
is more affordable anyway than some
of the other opportunities out there.
So people ask, " Do I want to have
a nicer new car or connect with my
family and do something that takes
us outdoors? "
What suggestions do you have for
park and recreation professionals
who want to reinvent their communities' expectations as they work to
get more children outdoors?

One of the changes with the consumer and young-person psyche is
the amount to which the reward system has shifted toward their peers.
Kids post an image to Facebook or
Instagram, and their measure of success is a certain amount of " likes. "
And they feel like a failure if they
don't reach that certain number of
likes. So you have a weird, different
system where the reward they get
is a social connectivity experience.
There's an element where wanting
to get people outdoors is fighting the
trend of a childhood spent indoors,
but it doesn't necessarily mean it's
fighting a childhood social media experience, because that's a reward system
that will not change. Think about how
you play into the actual use of social
media - is it geocaching where people are doing treasure hunts that are
GPS-driven? Is it actually embedding
social media into a park experience
with different types of adventures -
finding certain things, collecting certain things? It could be an experience
with their friends. It's not entirely an
outright crisis, and sometimes what
you are trying to do is find out how
you can integrate with one or two of
the trends.
What trends have you seen that offer
innovative and effective new ways
for park and recreation professionals
to reach community members?
It's going to be about social media.
And an interesting opportunity for
parks and rec is not just to think of social media as Facebook and Twitter,
but to realize that you have this boom
that has never really happened before
where now everyone is a photographer
with their phone. One of the trends
that goes along with that is " humble
bragging " - where when someone
achieves something, they like to share

that conquest with their friends. People
want to do these extreme challenges,
but almost for the sole purpose of being
able to share that photo on Facebook
or Instagram to get their friends to see
what they've done. I want to share that
picture of me getting to the top of the
mountain because one, I'm trying to
share my epic new Instagram photos
and two, I want to do some " humble
bragging, " meaning I want to share my
adventure because my conquest is actually pretty cool. For a teenager, those
two motivations are more important
in some sense than just going out to
spend a day in the park or a day climbing a mountain.
The highest importance they get is
that they got to share something epic.
And if you start thinking about it that
way, it's like " Well, wait a minute,
parks and rec actually offers an extraordinary plethora of opportunities to do
just that. "
Can you tell us about a memory from
your favorite park or rec center?
I've been to Las Vegas probably 15
times to speak. I don't gamble and
find it tough to walk into a 60-story
pyramid in the middle of the desert
and wonder how they made it. But
what I love about that area is that I
always pair it with an adventure to a
park that's on the outside of Vegas.
My favorite adventure was just exploring Death Valley's hidden little
ghost towns that are way off the beaten trail out in the middle of nowhere.
Just the sense of adventure and being in the wilderness, but connected
somehow to the past of these ghost
towns was, for me, one of my favorite
adventures in a park ever.
Interview by Roxanne Sutton, NRPA's
Marketing and Communications Specialist
(rsutton@nrpa.org).

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