On November 1, 2017, SHIFT held its second annual State Offices of Outdoor Recreation Workshop in Jackson, WY, as part of the 2017 SHIFT Festival.
The workshop, designed to create a toolkit for the creation of state offices of outdoor recreation, was developed on top of 2016’s program, which participants from North Carolina credited with taking “a year and a half” off the process of launching their office.
The 2017 workshop featured principals behind the drive for offices in Oregon, North Carolina, Vermont and Wyoming, as well as the country’s most recent Director of a state office of outdoor recreation, Montana’s Rachel VandeVoort.
Participants shared lessons learned from their efforts to create offices in a panel discussion format. The panel discussion was followed by a “Campaign Workshop” in which participants worked in teams to develop actionable plans for office creation in their respective regions.
Click here to download an overview of ideas, tools, and lessons learned during the 2017 workshop.
The summary complements a new report, Elevating Outdoor Recreation Together, completed by the Institute of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism at Utah State University with support from the Conservation and Outdoor Recreation Division of the National Park Service. That report provides an overview of the current state offices of outdoor recreation, provides best practices for how state offices of outdoor recreation can operate, and identifies opportunities for how the state offices can better partner with federal land-management agencies, the outdoor recreation industry, non-governmental organizations, and local outdoor recreation providers.
