Being active delivers so many benefits. These include physical and mental health and wellbeing, opportunity for social connection and learning, chronic disease prevention, creating identity and helping to grow our economy. For many people, sport and active recreation is an essential part of their community’s social fabric.
The Office of Recreation, Sport and Racing (ORSR) has embarked on an ambitious community engagement program seeking input from local communities, sport and recreation providers, councils and anyone else who has a view on sport and active recreation.
The URPS engagement team, together with ORSR, has recently completed 33 workshops held across South Australia over 8 weeks. Locations visited include Ceduna, Mount Gambier, Naracoorte, Whyalla, Port Augusta, Port Lincoln, Port Pirie, Berri, Clare, Kadina and Victor Harbor, as well as the Adelaide metropolitan area. This process has generated a massive amount of information about the aspirations people have for an active future, together with the challenges and opportunities to get more people active more of the time.
The success of such a significant engagement program was due to four main aspects:
- The genuine desire to hear community and stakeholder views.
- A well-designed engagement process and program by the ORSR/URPS team.
- Significant effort/resources in organising the logistics.
- Workshop activities which stimulated deep and relevant discussion about the issues and opportunities associated with sport and recreation.
