Exploring the evolving role of recreation in challenging circumstances
By Rick Gilbert
A resilient community, whether defined by geography, interest, experience, or identity, is one that has the resources to help prevent, withstand, and recover from emergencies. Resilient communities can adapt despite disturbances caused by emergencies and return to acceptable levels of functioning.” (Full Report: The Chief Public Health Officer of Canada’s Report on the State of Public Health in Canada 2023)
Introduction
In recent decades, the recreation sector has experienced more change than we are used to. We’ve taken on new imperatives such as physical activity, active transportation, and healthy eating in public settings, often in new partnerships with sectors such as Public Health, Natural Resources, and Transportation/Public Works. We’ve also built new partnerships with traditional allies such as sports and parks worked in new ways to address inequities faced by women and girls and Indigenous people and addressed anti-racism in our sector. Our long-term direction, for the first time, has been articulated through a National Recreation Framework and just as we were tapping into the power and potential of that movement, we were hit with the COVID-19 pandemic that sent our society and our sector into a tailspin.
In recent years, questionable environmental and social justice policy decisions from the past have come home to roost in the form of environmental and housing crises. The scope of this article includes the evolution of recreation's role in crisis mitigation, balanced with a focus on resilience as a means for individuals, families, and communities to cope with the realities of the times.
Let’s start by exploring some of the building blocks of this topic.
Resilience and Community
Although the word resilience hasn’t been prominent within the recreation sector until recent years, a case could be made that it has been a key benefit of recreation for many years. Resilience is defined as:
…the ability of young people, families and communities to navigate to the resources they need (which means those resources have to be available and accessible) and negotiate for these resources to be provided in meaningful ways.”
(Michael Ungar, What Works, page 18)