Provided by Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area
Juan Quezada, SAMO Youth program participant, interprets local wildlife for visitors at Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
WASHINGTON—Juan Quezada already had two summers at the Santa Monica Mountains
National Recreation Area under his belt when he took a three-month job at Yosemite National Park several years ago.
To Quezada, who hadn’t traveled far outside his native Los Angeles County, the sweeping granite vistas and narrow canyons were astounding. But as a bilingual Hispanic teenager, he found unexpected challenges in the park service internship —like being one of the only Spanish-speakers working at Yosemite.
“For me, being a minority, a Latino person, I was really intimidated working in an environment that was mostly Caucasian,” Quezada said. “I think the language barrier is a big problem (for the National Park Service), especially within a surrounding community with so many Hispanic people.”
As the National Park Service approaches its centennial in 2016, it is grappling with how to give minority visitors a greater sense of ownership of the parks and encourage the next generations of Americans to treasure these preserved lands.
Though it is difficult to track park visitors by race and age for privacy reasons, surveys of Americans show that members of minority communities are less likely to visit the federally funded park sites than whites.
In a major National Park Service survey done in 2001, 86 percent of African Americans surveyed had not visited a park within the previous 24 months, and nearly three-fourths of Hispanic people surveyed also were described as nonvisitors. White people surveyed had the highest rate for visiting parks.
The lag in visits by minority groups presents a challenge to the parks, especially with minority groups projected to become the majority of the U.S. population by 2050.
“If you come here as a new immigrant, they don’t give you a pamphlet that says, ‘Welcome to being an American citizen and by the way, here’s your national parks guidebook, you own this,’” said Maria Hinojosa, anchor and managing editor for National Public Radio’s Latino USA.
Though she never thought of herself as a “natural parks kind of girl,” Hinojosa agreed to serve on the Second Century Commission, which spent the last year developing a modern vision for the park system and delivered a full report to the Department of Interior in September. As part of the committee on connecting people and parks, Hinojosa represented the Latino community and helped the commission develop new ways for the parks to reach a broader and more diverse visitor base.
For the Latino community, some inclusive solutions could be as basic as having park materials, Web sites and staff available to accommodate Spanish-speakers or making picnic areas larger for family outings, she said.
Other solutions are a bit less intuitive, like making sure to welcome not only to U.S. citizens but legal residents and undocumented people.
“One of my specific recommendations was, ‘Can you please change the outfits so that they don’t look like the parks’ officers are somehow sheriff’s deputies,’ because right now in certain communities there is a tremendous amount of fear around issues of authority,” Hinjosa said. “We have to be sensitive it.”
The parks also need to focus on community outreach that targets more than the big Western parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite, but also highlights historic places under NPS jurisdiction in urban areas as well.
Outreach must more aggressively use new technology, too, according to the committee on connecting people and parks.
“If you think of many national parks, being out there a-ways or delivering something close to a 1950s experience in close to 2010, you’ve got a recipe for a declining degree of participation and engagement in the parks,” said Sally Jewell, president and CEO of outdoor recreation equipment company REI, Inc., who served as chair of the committee last year.
National security concerns have limited the ways in which park staff can use social networking and be relevant to a new generation of enthusiasts and some visitor and information centers are out of date. In many cases, parks have not taken advantage of opportunities like geocaching, using GPS in a virtual treasure hunt, or having rangers file tweets on mountain conditions.
“These are all things that spotlight the chronic lack of funding of the park service,” Jewell said. “They are starved for resources.”
In some cases, parks are focusing the resources they have on building strong relationships with target groups like young people.
It was a summer youth program at the Santa Monica Mountains outside Los Angeles that first brought Quezada, now a 22-year-old college student, to the parks in 2003. The program, called SAMO Youth, brings a small group of high school students to the mountains each summer and pays them to work, giving them the relationships to continue working for the park service if they wish.
“It’s their first time getting a job, it’s their first time going camping, spending time away from home,” said Antonio Solorio, program manager for youth outreach and recruitment at the Santa Monica Mountains. “It’s more than just the work skills they’re getting. It’s life skills.”
Though the program doesn’t track how many students stay involved in the parks, Solorio said he’s seen a number return, bringing family and friends.
Giving visitors a personal relationship based on their needs can help these destinations remain relevant.
Part of this is recognizing the different ways in which people do use the parks, Jewell said. Research done by REI has found that things like lack of transportation and uninspiring educational opportunities are some barriers to visits. The REI research also noted that while many Latino visitors want to use parks for family gatherings, African Americans were more interested in using the parks to stay fit.
That’s the kind of outreach that Greg Wolley had in mind when he co-founded the African American Outdoors Association in the Portland area in 2005. The group started with an idea for how to get people outside and active as a means of addressing health concerns in African American communities. The group organizes groups for regular hiking, skiing, canoeing and bicycling outings.
“In an urban lifestyle, maybe they didn’t camp as kids, they weren’t in scouts,” Wolley said. “What this could be is a shift of lifestyle for them. The health benefits just creep into it.”
By doing outreach in health and wellness organizations and developing trust between trip leaders and participants, the AAOA brings many of the same people on outings again and again. Today, some of the early participants who may have never seen themselves as natural park visitors are now leading trips of their own, Wolley said.
Hinojosa’s vision of herself and the parks has changed as well. Whether it’s visiting the Great Smokey Mountains as part of her commission work or listening to jazz at the General Grant National Memorial closer to her home in Manhattan, she’s definitely become a national parks kind of girl.
“These natural, open spaces are a place for you. They are yours as much as anyone else’s because you live in America and because you want to be out in the open,” Hinojosa said. “You are already part of the national park idea, so take ownership of it.”