I had the honor today of delivering the official welcome to the 2003 National Institute on Recreation Inclusion (NIRI). The NIRI conference was meeting at the Radison South Hotel in Bloomington. The conference was attend by 150-200 recreation professionals from around the country who are active in the area of “recreation inclusion”.
Recreation inclusion is shop-talk for the practice of inclusion of people with physical or mental disabilities into publicly provided recreational programming. Eden Prairie started a recreation inclusion program in 1988. It includes approximately 250+ people per year in the City’s recreation programs. Some of these programs are modified to be inclusive, and some are not. The challenge of inclusion is to create interesting recreation programming that is inclusive of both disabled and non-disabled citizens.
We have a terrific TR (therapuetic recreation) staff in our Parks & Recreation Department. Below are two staff members who are involved in TR activities now, or who worked in TR in our department.
That’s Nicole White on the left and Nicole Weedman on the right.
Two of our TR staff in our Parks & Recreation Department were responsible for brining the 2003 NIRI Conference to the Twin Cities:
current employee Carla Kress and former employee Tria Mann. They planned and organized this national conference with assistance from the cities of Bloomington, Edina, and ARC of Hennepin & Carver counties. They worked very hard to make this happen, and they did a great job.
That’s Carla on the left and that’s Tria on the right.
They made me feel included. Thanks!
