What Do We Focus On to Grow Outdoor Sport In Communities?
Mike Smith | OSI Executive Director
People often misunderstand our work at the Outdoor Sport Institute. It’s easy to assume growing more opportunities for outdoor sport in a community is measured in bikes and skis, or trails and program hours. The reality is we focus on building resilience. If a community has resilience, all these other opportunities will grow over time, but no amount of gear, trails, or program hours equal resilience. Quantity will look different in every community, but resilience looks the same.
Resilience means a system, in our case a community, can recover from or adapt quickly to difficulties. When developing outdoor opportunities, a community will inevitably run into setbacks, but if they’ve built resilience, growth will follow. In outdoor sport this can look like a land manager shutting down a trail, and a community finding better opportunities for access; a favorite youth program continuing to grow despite a change in leadership; or a school losing insurance to cover paddling programs, but finding partnerships in the community to still get students out on the water.
Resilience comes from building relationships, partnerships, and plans. Resilience is ensuring those plans are shared, communicated, and supported. Resilience is the ability to act on plans, capture learning, and reinvest it back into the community through mentorship and other means.
Resilience is not simply funding. A project, team, organization, or community without resilience can burn through funding without much to show for it. Resilience is not one project, program, or person. These things come and go, and too often what felt like capacity and resilience can go with them. We’re not trying to help communities pull off one youth program or build a single trail. We’re working to build capacity that allows an active, outdoor culture to advance despite adversity, and create an environment where trails, programs, gear access, and leadership will continue to emerge, evolve, and thrive.
The good news is that building this type of capacity in your own community doesn’t need to start with funding. Creating relationships, establishing partnerships, and honing a vision are real steps towards resilience you can start working on today. Resilience really just requires what communities have always relied on, people supporting each other.
If OSI can support you and your community in this process, let us know.