Whose National Park Service? An examination of relevancy, diversity, and inclusion programs from 2005-2006 |
As the U.S. population becomes more diverse, there has been a growing concern about the ability of the National Park Service (NPS) to remain relevant to individuals from different backgrounds, establish deeper connections with future generations, and to address the underrepresentation of diverse groups among national park visitors and in the NPS workforce. Implementing successful diversity and inclusion programs to foster relevancy, diversity and inclusion (RDI) is critical for the agency’s future. As the NPS implements RDI programs system wide, an assessment of current programs and initiatives is timely, providing information on the extent of follow-through, given policy directives and calls for increased focus on diversity in management. Thus, the purpose of this study was to catalogue NPS RDI programs targeting the areas of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, ability, age, economic status, gender, non-English speakers, tribal communities, urban populations, and veteran status, as well as examine some of the key characteristics related to the management and administration of these programs. In fall 2016, NPS employees were invited to participate in a comprehensive online inventory of RDI programs implemented between 2005 and 2016. A total of 161 park units participated, yielding a park unit response rate of 39%. A total of 1,359 RDI programs were reported, resulting in an average of 2.68 diversity aspects per program. Age (n=662; 17.7%), ethnicity (n=456; 12.2%), race (n=434; 11.6%), economic status (n=391; 10.4%) and urban population (n=361; 9.6%) were the dominant aspects of diversity reported across the RDI programs and initiates. The majority of the reported RDI programs (61.6%) were located in three regions: Northeast (n = 364; 26.8%), Midwest (n = 247; 18.2%), and Intermountain (n = 225; 16.6%) and concentrated in one of two emphasis areas: Co-creation and Community Engagement (n=563; 41.4%) and Connecting Youth with Our Mission (n=251; 18.4%). Nearly half of the identified programs (n=645; 47.5%) focused on an external audience such as visitors and 497 (36.6%) programs focused on both an external and internal audience. The number of new RDI programs has steadily increased from 16 new programs in 2006 to 256 new programs in 2016. Of the 1,359 RDI programs, 17.7% (n=240) of reported RDI programs are conducted annually. Internal funding supported 61.7% (n=838) of the reported RDI programs. For the collaboration structure, 42.8% (n=581) of programs collaborated internally and 53.9% (n=733) relied upon external collaborations. These findings were discussed based upon previous NPS management scholarship as well as Stanfield McCown’s (2011, 2012) conceptual model comprised of six connected themes critical to the success of NPS diversity efforts. The discussion also presented several managerial recommendations for the NPS such as refocusing efforts to broaden the amount of diversity aspects represented in RDI programming, creating more repeat programs to ensure youth and community members establish long-term relationships, initiating more RDI programs specifically for internal audiences, increasing external funding sources, and cultivating external partnerships to improve program sustainability.
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A People’s Future of Leisure Studies: Political Cultural Black Outdoors Experiences |
Public lands and the outdoor opportunities they afford are imbued with a long history of cultural and political contestations between the White settler colonial regime, Black and Native Americans. These contestations are grounded in starkly different values and beliefs systems pertaining to the landscape and human-nature relations. Despite the contestations, whiteness continues to dominate the narratives about public lands and its institutions. Furthermore, the ideology of wilderness - as a place of refuge, the antidote to urban living – remains the main frame of reference to explore outdoor experiences. Thus, as researchers continue to espouse this ideology of wilderness, they effectively suppress the experiences and values that African Americans and other people of color hold towards nature and historically shaped by their social and political realities. The history of slavery, post-slavery and Black dispossession, have conjured up innovative Black diasporic cultural practices of resistance, survival and self-determination. Through hidden outdoor spaces they have forged a culture of resistance, built social structures centered on African traditional practices, and engaged in alternative modes of environmental stewardship. The Black outdoors culture today have roots in this robust legacy of resistance and political struggle for self-determination and provide inspiration for outdoor recreation and environmental education programs that culturally and politically relevant to African Americans. In this paper we engage in an investigation on Black peoples’ political outlook of the outdoors and/or their political outlook on engagement with those spaces both historically and presently. In doing so, we first call attention to the need to critically examine diversity practices designed to accommodate a multi-cultural society and how they contribute to a cultural hegemony. We also review the history of research on outdoor experiences putting into sharper relief the Euro-centric values that dominate the analysis and maintain the cultural power of white racial identities. Finally, pulling from African American literary works, we propose Black-centered interpretations of nature centered on their cultural worldviews and political resistance against hegemonic models of dispossession, abstraction and commodification. The aim here is to advocate for the co-existence of multiple cultural imaginaries of nature defined by the social and political realities of different racialized people, thus responding to the call for different paradigms of outdoor recreation highlighted in this special issue.
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