Starting this year we will post quarterly updates on each active action team! Read below on what we've been up to so far in 2022.
In response to the Team’s policy & practice recommendations to improve equity of access to facilities, King County Parks property management team will be sharing a draft of their revised facility fee policy in July for feedback.
Team members from Burien, Tukwila, & King County Parks collaborated with Public-Health Seattle-King County to identify parks for the park observation pilot this summer. Public Health hosted a request for applications from community members to conduct observations of parks to gather data on how parks are utilized for physical activity and by whom. Four community members were selected to observe 10 parks in Tukwila, Federal Way, Burien, Des Moines, Seattle, & White Center. The team will collaborate with Public Health in September in reviewing findings and providing feedback on the report. Learn more about the park observation tool, System for Observing Play & Recreation in Communities (SOPARC).
As the Advocacy Team works to craft and advocate for recess and physical activity laws, members have done incredible work learning about the recess laws across the country. Washington is one of 27 states without a recess policy. Three states are attempting to pass legislation this year including New York, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. In the next month or so the Advocacy Team will propose what it is recommending in terms of a policy approach. Items for potential inclusion are
- Recess is not withheld as punishment
- Recess before lunch
- Recess minutes do not replace physical education minutes
- 30-60 minutes of recess or physical activity is required
The Gender Equity Shared Learning Action Team is in the middle of the implementation phase of the project. Throughout the summer and into the fall, the cohort organizations are continuing to refine and implement their gender action plans. Organizations will be completing another self-assessment before the end of the year and measure changes and progress based on the initial self-assessment completed this spring.
Cohort organizations are also participating in various workshop sessions throughout the summer. June’s session was centered around the recruitment of female coaches/staff, and July’s session will be a “Best Practices for Girls Inclusion” workshop.
This on-field training examines the four principles of:
- confidence come from competence
- celebrate wins, big and small
- contribution matters
- share power
The first cohort of the Youth Action Team concluded in June. Over the past several months, members have been hard at work on a youth participatory research action project to address “How can predominantly white sports be more inclusive of and welcoming to BIPOC youth?” Predominantly white sports included ice skating, hockey, mountain sports, rowing, lacrosse, and golf.
To research this questions, members:
- Created and disseminated a survey to youth in their local areas
- Created an interview guide and questions to interview peers and parents
- Analyzed both quantitative and qualitative results
Overall, most respondents highlighted the following barriers to accessing predominantly white sports, including:
- Parents not having enough time or available transportation to take their kids to far away games
- Several of these sports being too expensive to participate in, particularly because several of them require a lot of equipment
- A clique-like culture for both parents and youth participants leading them to feel excluded
- Parents not wanting their kids to join due to a fear of discrimination
Several peer respondents also mentioned not being interested in several of these sports because they didn’t have friends who did them and were worried about differences between them and the rest of the team. When the YAT reconvenes next fall, we hope to create recommendations based on our results and present our results and recommendations to influential audiences, such as athletic program directors.