Little Red's Big Ideas

Finally, a newspaper who gets it!

It was a tough weeknd!  My Chargers lost and my Vikings lost but I still felt like a winner when I read this Letter to the Editor in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  

The "City of Love," like so many urban areas struggles with youth crime and violence.  Ari Melman, a junior studying business administration at Drexel University pens this Op/Ed piece titled: "Curfews and Criminalization Won't Work." 

The article opens by saying, "The excessive criminalization of Philadelphia's young people has only pushed them toward flash mobs and other violent activities. Instead of responding with more criminalization - such as the city curfews instituted last summer - officials should be encouraging structured play, public spaces, and harmless social gatherings."

Safe spaces for structured play, recreation and socializing is key to juvenile crime prevention.  Continues Melman in his article, " Efforts to promote structured play, by contrast, have been proven to decrease violence in Philadelphia schools. At Charles Drew Elementary, the nonprofit organization Playworks helped improve student participation, cooperation, and focus in classrooms by organizing play at recess and other times, and violence went down school-wide, according to administrators. But uncertain district and school finances have put such successes in jeopardy; arts and play programs are often the first on the chopping block.

Youths in neighborhoods that support play tend to be better off and less violent, according to the National Recreation and Park Association. Students participating in at least one hour of extracurricular activity are 49 percent less likely to use drugs and 37 percent less likely to become teenage parents. Accessible public spaces help young people develop positive social relationships, learn conflict resolution, and become more civic-minded.

There are signs that policymakers are learning this. The city curfew, for example, was accompanied by extended hours at recreation centers - a sign that officials understand criminalization won't solve the problem.

Rather than categorizing all young people as probable criminals, the city and schools must adopt more policies that support and encourage law-abiding youths. When kids don't have ways to play peacefully, they find other ways to gather and entertain themselves. But if we stop treating our children like criminals, they'll stop playing that role."

Read the entire article by clicking here and tell us how your cities are reducing juvenile crime with creative alternatives.

Ouch! This hurts on a Monday Morning...

The Baltimore Sun, like so many other local newspapers has been covering the budget woes of its city. Specifically, they've reported that the City of Baltimore has asked for bids from private companies and organizations to take over the facility management and programming of its recreation centers.

In an October 12 article "Community leaders said they feared losing the centers, which they described as havens for youngsters in embattled neighborhoods. The city currently has 55 centers, with six more that are currently closed or run by others. The city had about 130 centers in the early 1980s."

This morning I woke up to this  Letter to the Editor from a Baltimore resident in response to the article which questions the need for government to be in the "babysitting" business.  Resident Donald Nichols says, "" Really, it's the city's responsibility to baby-sit the city's children? What happened to the parents in this equation? What happened to their responsibilities?

God bless the First Amendment! But, we have every reason to respond to this letter whether we live in the Baltimore area or not.  

Take a minute to click here go to the article and post a comment of your own.  Let people know that we are more than babysitting services AND without afterschool program, students would be left to their own devices while parents are working to pay the bills and ultimately pay their taxes.  Remind readers in Baltimore and beyond that it recreation programs are a proven, comparatively inexpensive form of crime prevention!  You know what to say!  Please take the time to say it before these types of rants break out in your local paper and in your communities!

People for Parks President Says City of Los Angeles Layoffs Wipe out 20 Years of Progress

Jack Foley, President of People for Parks, is a vocal park and recreation advocate in Los Angeles.  In an article which appeared in the Los Angeles Daily Times,Foley, a former professor of Recreation Studies at California State University, Northridge has harsh words to say about layoffs which have hit the recreation side of the department especially hard;

"This budget crisis is about to wipe out 20 years of progress in greening Los Angeles' urban core. Last month, the L.A. Department of Recreation and Parks began informing employees they were subject to layoffs. The first wave of pink slips set a troubling pattern: Almost all, 118 out of 125, are on the recreation side of the department. And none are in management.

Layoffs may be a reality, but eliminating recreation programs to keep up maintenance - aka the "Mow and Blow" strategy - will plant the seeds of social disaster. Across-the-board cuts should concern all Angelenos."

I've worked with the City of Los Angeles for more than a year as a marketing consultant as part of a Park Usage study being conducted by the RAND Corporation.  During my work I've had the chance to visit about 20 Los Angeles parks and am continually impressed by the amount of programs, events and customers served by a single Park Director and limited staff.  Foley's concerns are shared by park and recreation fans all over the country as staff are being asked to do more with less -- and less and less. 

Early findings of the RAND Park Usage study show that, without a doubt, the factor which drives people to the parks is programming.  Whether athletics or festivals -- structured activities are magnets.  Foley suggests the following:

"Layoffs may be inevitable, but Mow and Blow is not the right course of action. Instead, RAP must prune wisely to position the department for new growth when the economy revives. Until then, officials should do two things.

First, they should preserve and promote partnerships that share resources with other public and private agencies. The future belongs to efforts like Community-School Parks, a joint-use program between the city, Los Angeles Unified School District and People for Parks to tear up the asphalt and landscape elementary school playgrounds for students during the day and the community during weekends and breaks.

Secondly, they should hold the line in neighborhoods that cannot afford alternative recreation services. That means cutting managers and noncritical office staff while retaining front-line personnel and encouraging new partnerships and economic support."

So what types of drastic measures is your community being forced to take to save its precious resources? Please share!

Best Quote on Advertising I've Heard All Year

During the Amazon.com annual meeting last month in Seattle, CEO Jeff Bezos said:

"Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service."

In this era where word-of-mouth reigns supreme, this says it all!  What's your favorite business quote?

Celebrities Love Camp

Congratulations to the American Camp Association on its new PSA (public service announcement).  "Because of Camp" is engaging and enlightening.  The diverse spokespeople tell a great story about the many benefits of camps. 

How is your life better "because of camp?"

Changing of the Guard

In honor of our President-Elect -- I'm happy to share these quotes about "hope."  I love Obama's words of wisdom.  What's your thought on the subject?

Barack Obama:

We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.

Christopher Reeve:

Once you choose hope, anything's possible.

Dale Carnegie:

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.

Don Quixote:

Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.

Dorothy Thompson:

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.

Dorothy Thompson:

Fear grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light.

Elie Wiesel:

I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

Elizabeth Gilbert:

The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.

Elizabeth Gilbert:

To sit patiently with a yearning that has not yet been fulfilled, and to trust that, that fulfillment will come, is quite possibly one of the most powerful "magic skills" that human beings are capable of. It has been noted by almost every ancient wisdom tradition.

Erik H. Erikson:

Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.

George Bernard Shaw:

He who has never hoped can never despair.

Caesar and Cleopatra

Henri J. M. Nouwen:

All the great spiritual leaders in history were people of hope. Abraham, Moses, Ruth, Mary, Jesus, Rumi, Gandhi, and Dorothy Day all lived with a promise in their hearts that guided them toward the future without the need to know exactly what it would look like. Let's live with hope.

Henry Ward Beecher:

Repentance is another name for aspiration.

Jane Wagner:

A sobering thought: what if, at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential?

Kalidasa:

Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!

Lin Yutang:

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

Louisa May Alcott:

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow them.

Margaret Fuller:

I accept the universe!

(Ralph Waldo Emerson's reported response: "By God, she'd better!")

Marion Zimmer Bradley:

The road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.

Martin Luther King, jr.:

If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.

The Trumpet of Conscience

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

Molly Ivins:

I still believe in Hope - mostly because there's no such place as Fingers Crossed, Arkansas.

Patricia Hampl:

The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.

Pearl S. Buck:

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.

Pearl S. Buck:

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

Pearl S. Buck:

Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.

Reinhold Niebuhr:

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Rita Mae Brown:

Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.

Robert Fulghum:

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.

Robert G. Ingersoll:

Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.

Samuel Johnson:

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.

Thomas Jefferson:

I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail, but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.

1816

Thomas Merton:

Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

Unknown:

Rosa sat so Martin could walk, Martin walked so Barack could run, Barack ran so we all can fly.

Will Durant:

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

William Penn:

Never give out while there is hope; but hope not beyond reason, for that shows more desire than judgment.

Winston Churchill:

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

How to Roast a Hotdog in the Digital Age

Time Magazine's Editor-at-Large, Nancy Gibbs, wrote a beautiful tribute to camps titled, "The Meaning of Summer Camp" which you can read by following this link.  In it she says, "I never went away to camp, even though--or maybe because--my father became president of the American Camping Association (ACA) when I was a kid. He liked to joke that my idea of camping was room service. I might have resented this had it been any less true."

The editorial made me think, applaud and laugh out loud, especially when Gibbs explained her rationale for sending her own daughter to camp this summer.  She writes, "I suspected it was time to send my daughter off to camp even before the day the power went out in our neighborhood and she and a hungry friend tried to roast a hot dog over a candle. Absent electricity, they spent the days making ankle bracelets and playing board games and writing a play together because no power means no screens, no iChat, no Sims. So I wasn't looking for some fancy culinary camp or robotics camp or whatever is fashionable now, just for someplace that teaches the appropriate interactions of sticks, weenies and flame. With no plugs."

"Summer Camps.  Unplugged and Proud of it!"

 Maybe that's the slogan we should be promoting.

After you read the article, take a minute to write Nancy (just click on her name under the headline) letting her know what you thought of her article or sharing a relevant story from your camp.  Letters to the editor are one of the most effective (and FREE) ways to get into print.  And TIME Magazine is read by millions. 

Magic Johnson endorses Parks

I was all excited this morning when I saw this headline : “Magic Johnsonendorses Parks…” in the LA Times.Finally, I thought, the park and recreation profession has found a celebrity spokesperson to sign its praises, shed light on budget deficits and draw attention to the benefits of parks and recreation.  My enthusiasm was quickly squashed when I saw that the endorsement was for a man named Bernard Parks(with an upper case "P") who is running for Los Angeles County Supervisor.  I have absolutely no idea if Mr. Parks is a parks advocate – but, with a name like that, it makes sense for him to support the parks in the LA County System as well as the Municipal and National Parks in the county. 

 

Now, for Magic Johnson:  Why not step up and speak out on behalf of park systems around the nation?  As a professional athlete, you, no doubt, spent some time shooting hoops in our nation’s parks before hitting it big.  We need your magic, Magic, to draw attention to the amazing value of public parks. Have your people call my people – 760.809.3231.

Olivia's Voice

Olivia is an amazing writer.  She uses metaphors to paint beautiful pictures with words and knows how to transform an abstract concept into clear, concrete language.  Olivia love to write.  She loves a blank sheet of paper the way and artist loves a canvas or a thespian loves the stage.  More importantly, though, Olivia knows how to edit and polish her work.  She takes constructive criticism with class and charm and knows that feedback is a gift that ultimately improves her writing. 

Did I mention Olivia is eight?  I've known this blond-haired beauty for a couple of years.  She and my son, Spencer, have shared the same amazing teacher, Cathy Stoll, for two years, now.  I've been talking to Olivia about writing for my blog and, after explaining to her what a blog is, she beamed with excitement.  Only two days after I gave Olivia her first "assignment" she handed me a scroll that revealed a wonderfully crafted response to this questions, "What does play mean to you?  What is fun?" 

So here is Olivia's response in its original form -- Click on the image to en large -- and enjoy...

Curious Jodi

By nature I am very curious.  While I wasn't raised by a man in a yellow hat, I do love digging deeper, discovering something new and finding answers that lead to more questions.  I attend dozens of conferences every year and talk to thousands of people.  Through my various live and virtual networks I'm often privy to insightful customer suggestions, feedback and comments.  Some are stories gathered while "mystery shopping" client facilities such as community centers, parks, fitness centers -- even swimming pools or camps. 

In other cases, I ask questions directly to a particular group or individual...

Because I have a grade school child, I have close contact with school-age kids  -- some of whom are fantastic and creative writers.  From time to time, I work in the classroom as a volunteer teaching creative writing skills.  Often I ask kids to write about a certain topic that might relate to you, my blog readers.  When children write about (and grown-ups read about) topics such as play, fun, fitness, sports, camping, nature,, teamwork, etc. it is a great way to bridge the gap between programmer and customer. 

I also am becoming a huge fan of on-line social networks for many reasons -- not the least being their ability to reach millions of people with little or no financial investment.  Professionally, as a speaker and writer I am overwhelmed by the intelligent answers I've gotten (especially on LinkedIn and ClubMom) to "market research questions.'  On ClubMom for example I asked Moms of tweens, "Do you send your child to summer camp?  Why or why not?"  On LinkedIn, my favorite social network for business people like you and me, I asked, "How did working at a summer camp impact your career?" 

In both cases, I got great and thoughtful responses which I will share and edit in upcoming posts.  By sharing some of the best "conversations" on my blog I hope you'll gain valuable insight from the customer's point of view. 

Do you have a question you'd like me to ask my actual and virtual network of customers, buddies, friends, fans, contacts and communities?  Let me know by posting a COMMENT below...