New work from the coalition's facilities access Action team
The Facilities Access Action Team was formed in response to inequities of youth access to recreation facilities across our County. Building on feedback from community leaders, the State of Play: Seattle-King County report highlighted challenges of reserving facilities and how policies such as historic use disproportionately negatively impact new organizations posing barriers to field access.
The team is comprised of park agencies, community-based non profits, school districts, professional sports teams, and private facility owners. The team spent 8 months reviewing reservation policies, practices, and rental fee structures through a lens of impact on equity evaluating how Black, Indigenous, and communities of color have been impacted. The team looked to other regions nationally to learn about promising strategies to improve access and discussed how policies, practices, and fee structures in our region could be changed to improve facility access for youth furthest from play equity.
The team developed the following recommendations of policy changes that park agencies and school districts could implement to improve equity of access to facilities for organizations serving Black, Indigenous, youth of color whom are typically furthest from play equity. The team presented their recommendations to the full Coalition membership who provided additional feedback along with the Coalition’s Leadership Team who ultimately endorsed the recommendations. The Facility Access Action Team will continue to collaborate and share learnings as park agencies and school districts implement these changes.
IMPROVE RESERVATION PROCESSES
- Prioritize access for organizations serving a majority of youth furthest from play equity.
– Prioritize facility time allocation, including holding space specifically for organizations of color.
– Reach out to organizations serving youth of color to build partnerships & expand access for their participants. - Simplify and streamline the reservation process for school and park facilities.
– Use digital processing of signatures, requests, and approvals.
– Develop a centralized reservation platform across all school districts & park agencies.
– Offer sustained requests or repeated requests to reduce frequency of administrative burden to process reservations. - Improve communications and promotion of tiered fee structures and/or partnership models.
- Reduce insurance burdens on community partners and rental users or provide financial resources to support insurance requirements.
DEVELOP GOALS TO IMPROVE EQUITY OF ACCESS
- Collect demographic data of organizations requesting and receiving facility access.
– Race, ethnicity, youth qualifying for free/reduced price lunch.
– Require organizations to submit data with reservation request.
– Accept estimates of participant data.
– Provide option for organizations who do not collect that data to note that.
-Explain the reasons why the data is being collected (to improve equity of access). - Analyze demographic data of existing user groups to inform baseline and goal development by understanding who has access and who does not.
- Establish a goal of how many new groups to add to each season and from what communities.
- Analyze facility use data.
– Distribution of prime time access by organization.
– Frequency and duration of historic access by organization.
– Monitor when reservations are not being used.
– Service area of organizations compared to facilities they are provided access to.
– Access to renovated facilities by organization.
– Analyze turnover and type of use by sport & community. - Evaluate how historic use policy impacts equity of access and consider alternative approaches.
– Conduct bi-annual evaluation to analyze who has access to facilities.
– Ask user groups if allocated time was adequate for their programs. - Balance facility demand with location and burden of transportation by resources of group.
- Develop goals for groups serving youth of color furthest from play equity to have priority access to high quality facilities.
REVISE HISTORIC USE POLICY
- Develop a strategy to balance the need for stability and predictability with equity of access to groups serving youth of color.
– Hold a portion of prime time on facilities for new users - Require users to demonstrate alignment with equity goals to maintain access level.
- Incentivize partnerships between historic users and new groups needing access.
- Honor identity and access of each organization
- Develop win/win approach for both historic users and new users
- Communicate the inequities and need for a new approach to key stakeholders and policy makers.
CHANGE FACILITY FEE STRUCTURES
- Provide multiple tiers of partnership and fee levels to account for variant financial capacities of organizations.
– Prioritize access & reduced or waived fees for organizations focused on serving youth of color.
– Develop & sustain partnerships with organizations serving youth furthest from play equity.
– Develop standard criteria of each partnership level & clearly communicate terms. - Consider contribution of an organization beyond the fee such as they may be providing a unique program or serving a priority population.
- Promote and incentivize partnerships among organizations/user groups.
– Example: An organization with greater fiscal capacity could sponsor an emerging community-based organization by covering facility fees or insurance costs.