November 2017 - Parks & Recreation - 55

Member Spotlight: Carol Potter
By Cort Jones

esilience is defined as the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. Resilience is especially important for the military in helping to overcome traumatic experiences encountered during deployments, to help family members
cope with those deployments, to reduce stress and to boost energy levels.
Carol Potter, who recently retired from the Department of Defense (DoD) after
more than 33 years, was the assistant director of the Morale, Welfare and Recreation
(MWR) policy within the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Military Community and Family Policy. She recognized that too many service members
were returning from the adrenaline high experienced during deployment and engaging
in harmful activities to get that same adrenaline rush. She also recognized that recreation - particularly high-adventure recreation - when offered in a supervised and
safe environment, serves as a healthy alternative to destructive behavior.
Parks & Recreation magazine recently caught up with Potter to learn more
about her work developing policy for
MWR and helping to build resilience
for service members. Potter, who is one
of the five judges for the National Gold
Medal Awards for Excellence in Parks
and Recreation, became the head judge
for that award after this year's NRPA
Annual Conference in New Orleans.

Parks & Recreation: What was your role
at the Department of Defense?
Carol Potter: I developed policy for the
Morale, Welfare and Recreation (MWR)
program and worked with the services to
develop recreation programs that would
enhance not only the service members' experiences, but also build physical and mental health. I conceptualized the " return and
recreate " initiative to promote recreation
for returning deployed service member and
their families to reduce stress, promote reintegration and build resilience. I also challenged military recreation programs to meet
the " return and recreate " needs of our service members, and all four military services
developed a program to fulfill this initiative.
P&R: What led to you recognizing the
need for these types of recreation

programs for service members?
Potter: Well, going further than that,
I have a deep passion for recreation. I
learned that when we were in Iraq and
Afghanistan, our service members were
returning and killing themselves in greater numbers once they returned home than
those soldiers we had lost in the war. They
had been on such an adrenaline high the
entire time they were deployed, then
they come home and they're still looking
for that excitement. So, they were doing things like speeding, drinking, using
drugs and getting into accidents. I got to
thinking about it, and the key is that with
MWR we can offer service members, as
well as their families, adrenaline-inducing
experiences through just recreation opportunities. That really developed my push to
get the military services more involved in
looking at how our service members recreate once they come back home.
P&R: How was this push to get the
military services more involved in
recreation for service members received?
Potter: Every branch of service has developed specific recreation programs to
work with service members once they return home. Each one of the services calls
it something different, but they all benefit

the service members. So, it has been very
beneficial not only to active service members, but also to their families and veterans.
P&R: Even after retiring from DoD, you're
still doing a lot to present the benefits of
recreation for service members. What are
you working on now?
Potter: The next thing I did was to look
at recreation and building resilience. I
got several of the services to offer preand post-activity surveys, and each survey had to do with being able to measure
resilience when service members and
families participate in a wide variety of
recreation activities. This research project studied 40 recreation activities, and
in each study, participants increased
their resilience. The research demonstrated that military recreation programs
facilitate building physical and mental
resilience in service members and families, which increases military readiness.
We're looking at programs at each phase
of deployment - before, during and
after. Commanders want to know that
their service members are ready to complete whatever mission they are given,
and being resilient allows that to happen.
I highly encourage partnering with the
military and providing recreation opportunities for our service members - it's
very important and so beneficial for not
only the service members and their families, but also for the community.
Cort Jones is the Associate Editor for Parks &
Recreation magazine (cjones@nrpa.org).

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