If you’re a young person interested in the outdoors, or someone who works with kids, or in outdoor recreation, Laura Goodrich wants to hear from you.
Goodrich, who is serving as on-the-ground director of Sweet Home All Lands Collaborative efforts to establish a Community Forest east of Sweet Home (see accompanying info box), is working to start the feet-on-the-ground portion of creating the forest and a trail running between Sweet Home and Cascadia.
She is holding a meeting of local youth workers from noon to 1 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 20, at the Jim Riggs Community Center to discuss how to help young people engage with the outdoors. Goodrich said that during a December visit by representatives of the Livability Initiative to Sweet Home to evaluate the community’s strengths and weaknesses as a place to live, tour participants heard from high school students about what they believed would increase local residents’ connection to the outdoors.
“They had good ideas,” she said. “We want to bring them into the planning process.”
To do that, she decided to build on the results of a “Day Five” meeting in September of 2012, held after the institution of the four-day school week in Sweet Home, which brought together various individuals and organizations who work with local youth to determine who was planning what services and activities and to see what other ideas or opportunities existed for young people.
“A lot of the same stakeholders are going to be involved,” Goodrich said of the Community Forest planning. “We decided to bring together providers of outdoor recreation and education and get more folks involved.” The first meeting will focus on “bringing people together” to see what kind of relationships can be developed with the end goal of getting young people involved in the outdoors, she said.
Goodrich is also circulating three surveys, one for young people, one for parents and one for providers of activities for youth, to “help outdoor education, recreation and youth development representatives to develop the most robust outdoor education and recreation activities for Sweet Home’s youth.”
The survey for middle and high school students is available at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YoungAdultRecreationSurvey. It asks teens about their favorite outdoor activities, why those activities are important to them, how often they engage in them and what steps could be taken to increase their recreation in the outdoors.
The survey for parents, which asks similar questions, is at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ParentRecreationSurvey.
The survey for education and recreation providers who work with youth is at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SummerYouthOutdoorEducationandRecreationProvidersSurvey. It asks what activities the person or organization has provided, the success of those activities, plans for additional activities and what it would take to make those activities successful, what types of partnerships exist between organizations that provide youth activities and the desire to further those partnerships.
The deadline for all three surveys is Friday, March 7.
Goodrich said the surveys are being circulated through community networks, the school district and “community organizers.” She said an effort is being made to get teachers involved.
She’s interested in discussing such topics as what it would take to get young people into the outdoors, transportation challenges, interest from churches and community groups in working with children and teens, and how to facilitate current and potential programs to get kids into the outdoors.
For more information, contact Goodrich at 541-367-4554 or e-mail her at lgoodrich@ci.sweet-home.or.us.
Your guide to the alphabet soup
What is SHALC?
Sweet Home All Lands Collaborative is a group of local leaders who have been working since 2012 to coordinate land and watershed management in the South Santiam watershed.
Their goal is to increase economic use of the forest, environmental and forest health, improve quality of life in the area and protect cultural resources.
What is the Community Forest?
The governor’s office has created a Solutions Team made up of representatives from a wide variety of federal, state and local agencies to focus on creating a community forest east of Sweet Home. The purpose of the community forest is to provide recreation and wood products dollars for the community – jobs.
The plan is to make a central feature of the forest to be a trail that would run from Sweet Home to the west border of the national forest east of Cascadia. The plan is for the Solutions Team to end in March and SHALC to assume leadership of the community forest creation effort.
What is the Livability Initiative?
This is a two-year project, which began last fall, by SHALC, working with the nonprofit Conservation Fund, the Federal Highway Administration and other federal agencies, to strengthen the livability of communities, including Sweet Home, that are neighbors to federally managed lands.
Sweet Home’s participation in the program could lead to financial help to build the local economy and make the community healthier in a variety of ways. The goal is to figure out how natural assets in the area can be enhanced to further health, vitality, and overall physical and economic well-being in the community.
What is RARE?
RARE is an AmeriCorps program administered through the University of Oregon’s Community Service Center.
RARE AmeriCorps is supported by grants from government agencies and nonprofits, and by funding from the community that hosts a RARE AmeriCorps member. RARE “interns” work for 11 months (1,700 hours), with support from program staff, in areas such as community or natural resource planning, community or economic development, or community food assessments and development.
Sweet Home’s RARE representative is Laura Goodrich, a Portland State University graduate student, who began in September 2013 and is scheduled to work with the Sweet Home All Lands Collaborative on its various projects through this July.
Originally Published in The New Era
1313 Main Street
Sweet Home, Oregon 97386
Phone: 541-367-2135