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Welcome to the first peek at NRPA’s “Equity in Practice” digest! Officially launching in 2025, the semiannual “Equity in Practice” digest will serve as your go-to guide for all things equity in parks and recreation. As is the nature of parks and recreation, we want to make the digest fun and approachable whether you are a seasoned park and recreation professional or if you are an early career professional.

From Access to Awesome

First, let’s talk about just a few of the equity wins this year. These are some of the moments when we really hit the mark in making parks and recreation more inclusive, accessible and fun for all.

Let’s start in Wake Forest, North Carolina. In early 2024, the Holding Park Inclusive Playground opened. This inclusive playground, designed for children of all abilities, includes accessible entrances to the playground and its apparatuses and a mix of sensory-rich play experiences. I had an opportunity to visit this park in June and was taken aback by the breadth of opportunities this redesign afforded for all young people to enjoy Holding Park.

Similarly in Oregon, Lincoln City Parks and Recreation broke ground on the new Schooner Creek Discovery Park, the first inclusive and accessible public playground on the Oregon Coast. Key features of this park include easy entry (for mobility devices) carousels and slides, sensory zones and calming areas, and playground equipment that has different levels of challenge right next to each other, allowing youth of different abilities to play together.

And how about Ramsey County (Minnesota) Park and Recreation that won NRPA’s Innovation in Equity Award (2024) for its “Signs of Belonging” project? Ramsey County and the Metropolitan Council teamed up with five local artists to develop five unique designs welcoming all to their county and regional parks. A key goal of this project was to give artists of color a prominent voice in the parks with each artist bringing their unique perspective and identity to their design based on the prompt: “What would make you feel welcome and a sense of belonging in the park?” The artists’ designs, which bring a unique and vibrant lens to traditional park signs, are featured in newly-designed park-use kiosks featuring new maps and artwork at all parks within the Ramsey County system.

Those are just a few of the local wins we have seen in 2024!

Looking back a bit more globally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention the work of NRPA’s DEI Network. These dedicated park and recreation professionals led the development of NRPA’s first set of Equity Quick Guides. The quick guides are bite-sized toolkits designed for park and recreation professionals across all occupation levels and types, and especially for those aiming to make a tangible difference in their communities, while juggling limited capacity. Two quick guides were released in September: Developing an Inclusive Swimwear Attire Policy and Inclusive Event and Program Naming. We look forward to sharing four more quick guides with you in 2025!

We also had the opportunity to learn from more than 100 education sessions specific to equity and inclusion at the 2024 NRPA Annual Conference this past October. Topics ranged from creating inclusive “all wheel” skateparks, to exploring what inclusion means in the up-and-coming world of artificial intelligence, to cultivating belonging through mentoring, the arts, and even line dancing!

To top that all off, we had nearly 100 park and recreation professionals participate in our Equity in Practice certificate program in 2024. That’s just outright incredible!

More to Come

As we wrap up 2024 and this first peek into NRPA’s “Equity in Practice” digest, we hope you’re as excited as we are to dive into the full experience in 2025. Think of the digest as a little sprinkle of inspiration, maybe a celebration here and there, and I’m even betting on a few giggles — all in the name of inclusion in parks and recreation. So, stay tuned — there’s plenty more to come!

Tiff Cunin is Senior Manager of Education, DEI at NRPA.