IPRS Takes A Stand

EDITORIAL

The most important need today is to recruit top students from the minorities into the recreation curriculums in the colleges and universities.

Colleges and universities should expand their curriculum to include an option that relates to recreation in the urban environment.

The NRPA should develop an affirmative action plan and appoint an affirmative action officer to develop opportunities for minority professionals in the organizational structure of NRPA.

The NRPA should attempt to ensure minority representation on all working committees within the organization. The NRPA should not form an Ethnic Minority branch or society within the NRPA structure. The Park and Recreation Movement must be that of a total profession working together to provide park and recreation opportunities to all the people.

A separate ethnic society would be against the principles of this movement to serve all people. Secondly, IPRS believes that a separate society or branch would aggravate rather than improve an admitted problem of minority involvement within the profession. Involvement within the separate society would be great, but IPRS has a strong feeling that minority involvement opportunities within the existing branches would decrease.

The IPRS would strongly urge that minority professionals, including women, work within the existing NRPA structure. They should be very aggressive in placing minority concerns before the membership and fighting for their approval. In the long run this approach will be much more successful.

Kavadas to Push Local Park Land

More local parks and forest preserves is the goal of a newly staffed program of the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC).

Theodore M. Kavadas is leaving the Illinois Department of Conservation, where he is assistant director, to become Local Government Officer of NIPC. A specific first assignment will be to work with local governments to implement the Regional Open Space Plan adopted by NIPC in 1971.

The Plan calls for heroic commitment of public funds to land acquisition for public recreational open space, before the best sites are privately developed. Money is the principle obstacle to be overcome. Kavadas will show local park districts and forest preserve districts how to apply for a proposed state matching fund program which would have $10 million to spend in 1973, as well as how to obtain all available federal matching funds.

Kavadas has been in the parks and recreation field since he was an Indiana University undergraduate in the 1950s. He headed the Glenview Park District recreation program before starting his own consulting firm. He is a past president of the Illinois Parks and Recreation Association. His work for the state included reorganizing a major division of the Department of Conservation, developing long range fiscal and policy plans, and dealing with federal funding program.

Illinois Parks and Recreation 14 March/April, 1973