Engaging Duluth Residents During COVID-19 By, Alicia Watts, Assitant Manager, City of Duluth Parks and Recreation
Last year started like any other, we were planning our spring programming as usual when March arrived. Never in my career, would I have anticipated we’d be closing playgrounds and encouraging people not to gather in our parks. That’s not something that I imagine we, as park and recreation professionals, joined the field for. While the pandemic has certainly thrown us all a curveball this year, there is still so much for us and our community to be proud of. Early on, our team pivoted quickly, initiated many passive recreation activities, and focused on how we could continue to engage with the community virtually. We increased our social media attention and got to work creating more than 46 informational videos including “how-tos” and virtual tours of our parks. We planned family-friendly, self-guided activities that are now a mainstay in our recreation delivery. Our recreation team designed programs such as the Egg Hunt, Trivia Trail, the Joke Trail, Halloween Hunt, and the Turkey Search along both popular and lesser-known parks and trails in a dual effort to expand our community’s awareness of family-friendly locations they may not have visited before. We collaborated with the library’s story stroll program and brought Play
Gym outside and into the parks. Play Gym caters to our youngest parks and recreation users—pre-school and younger—to enjoy age and sizeappropriate rec equipment with their adult caregiver present. While typically held indoors, we brought it outdoors and adapted its delivery to safely allow this program to pop up in parks across the City. Early on in the pandemic, social distancing on our trails was a challenge. A combination of few places to go for recreation and entertainment coupled with the annual spring freeze-thaw cycle meant we needed to find more destinations for people to enjoy and not damage the natural surface trails. Ultimately, we closed about 10 miles of gravel and paved roads for walking and biking. This was a big hit, and we coupled some of the previously mentioned Trivia Trail activities with these closures. One additional programmatic feature added to trails in Duluth for winter 2021 is the pilot of a new Snowshoe Stompers program. Volunteers adopt a portion of closed road or a designated trail route and commit to snowshoeing it after each snowfall to create more packed surfaces that will support winter walking options. The program opened for volunteers on December 10, 2020
and all volunteer openings were filled in a day. In total there are roughly 10 miles of trails adopted into this program. Since launching, we’ve also noted more social media chatter regarding folks “stomping” other trails for both their own recreation and to help pay it forward for walking and biking based on the type of trail. In a year that pushed our team to deliver recreation in so many new ways, we’re really proud of how well adaptations were made to deliver quality recreation in our community. We will continue to evaluate all of our pandemic-related adaptions and determine which may be contenders for continuing into the future even post-pandemic.
Winter 2021 • MINNESOTA Recreation and Parks 27
