February 2024 - Parks and Recreation - 21

PHOTO COURTESY OF CLAYTON POTTER, TOWN OF GROTON, CONNECTICUT
Following a cooking demonstration,
community members take home bags
with the recipe and its ingredients.
to engage and build rapport with
community members who were not
familiar with the GCC location or
with center staff. This engagement
made community members
feel
comfortable providing honest feedback
about the Community Wellness
Hub and what programs and
services it should provide. " [T]he
community engagement piece was
really key and huge to developing
our equity goals...and I see that as
a way of not only getting information
from the community but also...
[creating] that welcoming space that
we envision with the wellness hub, "
says Mallqui.
Because the survey revealed that
an estimated 75 percent of community
members had never visited
the community center, the team prioritized
making the GCC a space
where all would feel welcome to
access the programs and services
they desired, whether that was picking
up a meal, getting a blood pressure
screening, taking a cooking or
language class, or utilizing another
service. " We have our own ideas of
what people want, but really want
those answers to come from the
community, " says Ben Morse, manager
of recreation services at Groton
Parks and Recreation.
Establishing Equity Goals
Community
members identified
the need for increased access to
swimming lessons in the mini survey.
Barbour says, " [T]he ability of
people to access swimming pools
has run along racial lines for a long
time and to a certain extent, continues
to do so. "
" We're a shoreline town, so the
safety aspect of swimming is huge
where we are, and there [are] barely
any offerings of swim lessons....
[W]e recognize that we need to
make lessons affordable for everyone
to be able to participate, " says Morse.
Using the feedback, the team developed
four equity goals to pursue
during the 18-month grant period:
* Facilitate or participate in ongoing
community
engagement
activities that provide focus and
direction for policies, programs,
services and evaluation. The data
will fuel a continuous process
improvement initiative focused
on forwarding racial equity.
* Create written partnership agreements
with
three communityserving
organizations that can
support one or more of the seven
dimensions of well-being.
* Utilize information gleaned from
community engagement work to
expand and/or tailor food and/or
meal offerings in the community.
* Increase access for non-swimmers
to swimming lessons in the community.
Forming
Partnerships
When seeking to advance health equity,
park and recreation professionals
" should reach out to their local
public health departments. There's
local expertise in communities that
can help and often have people that
are eager to help and can provide
services, " says Barbour. " You want
to have those connections to your
community before you need them. "
Morse says, " [A]s a park and
recreation department, we know
how to program, we know how to
run events, but we don't necessarily
know the other aspects of food
insecurity or how to run flu clinics
or COVID-19 testing. All these different
things go into a wellness hub.
You need that partnership with the
health department and the resources
that come with it. "
Alexandra Reynolds is Associate Editor of Parks & Recreation
magazine (areynolds@nrpa.org). Maureen Neumann is Senior
Program Manager at NRPA (mneumann@nrpa.org).
PARK S ANDRECRE AT ION . OR G | FEBR U AR Y 2 0 2 4 | Parks & Recreation
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February 2024 - Parks and Recreation

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