JANUARY 21, 2010 ISSUE
Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation Representatives Visit Boone, Discuss Parkway-Related Programs
Carolyn Ward and Jason Urroz of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation came to Boone last Wednesday, January 13, to meet with High Country persons interested in possible partnerships this year. Photo by Corinne SaundersAfter meeting Bettie Bond, committee coordinator for Boone’s Blue Ridge Parkway 75, at a recent Our State event in Asheville, Carolyn Ward and Jason Urroz of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation were invited to Boone for a meeting last Wednesday, January 13, regarding potential partnerships and activities for the upcoming year, Ward said.
The meeting’s purpose was to “figure out ways we can partner that are mutually beneficial,” Ward said.
The Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, a major sponsor of the Parkway’s 75th anniversary events and the organization that runs the license plate programs and solicits donations for the historic road, seeks to ensure that the Parkway is preserved for future generations.
The foundation funds everything not covered by the Parkway’s regular budget, Ward said.
Based in Asheville, Ward is project director for Healthy Kids/Healthy Parks and Urroz serves as project manager for Healthy Kids/Healthy Parks.
“One of our primary focuses is Kids in Parks programs,” Ward said.
The TRACK (Trails, Ridges & Active, Caring Kids) program is a main component of the Kids in Parks Initiative and features brochures that help kids ages 3 to 15 take self-guided discovery tours on a trail.
The program thus allows them “to go out and have a more intimate connection with nature instead of just walking,” Urroz said.
“We’re trying to get kids to unplug from TV, get outside and explore,” Urroz said, adding that August 29 marked the grand opening for the Kids in Parks program in Asheville.
Several different brochures, including hide-and-seek and season-specific pamphlets, allow kids to explore the same trail looking for different items.
“By getting connected to things in nature, [the kids] will have more meaningful experience [and] want to go again,” he said.
The activities in the brochures range from asking kids to find certain types of birds and fungi to helping them identify types of ferns.
Kids who go on the TRACK trails can register their hikes online, and by doing so, win one prize per hike. A bandana with a scavenger hunt printed on it is the prize for a kid’s first hike, the second prize is a nature journal and pencil and “there are several other steps, up to a walking stick,” Urroz said.
Once a child earns the walking stick, he or she graduates the program, and the hope is that he or she will no longer need incentives to go out and enjoy nature.
“We’ll be wildly successful when we’re not needed anymore,” Ward said of the program.
This year, however, Kids in Parks is expanding to include a trail in Wytheville, Va., one in the Pisgah National Forest and a trail in Cherokee. After those trails are completed, Ward and Urroz hope to set in motion a TRACK trail in the High Country, they said.
Once additional trails—all of which are close to the Parkway, if not directly off it—are incorporated into the program, Urroz said he hopes it will “get people traveling the Parkway [and] coming to the Parkway.”
So far, 45 children ages 3 to 10, with an average age of 4.65, have registered hikes on the Asheville trail with the Kids in Parks Web site, Urroz said.
Several of the kids have hiked two or three times, which demonstrated to Urroz that the program’s incentives are working, he said.
Not many programs currently target children preschool age and younger, but Kids in Parks boasts educational activities and creative ways to engage them in nature, Ward said.
“You can only reach a child in school while they’re in school,” Ward said, adding that the program targets a “much wider audience.”
She hopes to interest families in taking a hike together, especially families with young children, to engage the future students in nature even before their traditional schooling begins.
“Hopefully they have so much fun out there it becomes an activity of choice,” she said, adding that it will contribute to the kids’ health and the future health of parks, because kids will take care of the outdoors when they are older if they form that affinity with it while young.
For more information, click to www.kidsinparks.com.
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