ParkSeek – Opportunity to share feedback!

[Alexander “AJ” Wray]

The ParkSeek project is an exciting new pan-Canadian initiative to gather and share information about the population health impacts of parks and recreational facilities. The project involves researchers, practitioners, and communities across the country, being led by the Human Environments Analysis Lab at Western University. The goals of the project are to investigate geographic accessibility to, quality of experiences in, and the policies associated with parks and recreational facilities. Future project activities will be informed by the experiences and dialogues of participants at this research summit.

If you have not done so already, please watch this presentation about the project’s activities and outcomes before answering the following questions: https://vimeo.com/519976781

We invite all conference attendees to contribute their thoughts on the following questions. Feel free to comment on all of the questions, or just the questions that you are interested in. If you would like to arrange a meeting with the project team to discuss these questions, and the project more generally, please email parkseek@uwo.ca

1. What is your definition of a park, protected area, and/or recreational facility?
2. What other projects in the country are you aware of that would be beneficial for ParkSeek to know about?
3. How would you describe the links between parks and population health in one sentence?

Related to the geographic accessibility objective for the project:

1. What does geographic accessibility mean to you? Does it mean the park is in close proximity? It can be easily reached? Or something else?
2. How would you recommend we classify the role, importance, and/or influence of different types of parks and protected areas?
3. How would you incorporate these measures into your own research, policy, and program activities? What types of data would you link these measures to? At what scale, postal codes, dissemination areas?

Related to the quality objective for the project:

1. What types of questions, and topic areas would you want covered in the household survey?
2. For the real-time survey tool, what information would you like to collect from visitors?
3. What communities, or type of communities, are missing from parks, protected areas, and recreational facility research?

Related to the policy objective for the project:

1. The project is currently set to analyze policies with a health equity lens, focusing on factors like cultural background, socioeconomic status, gender, etc. What other ways would you want to analyze policies?
2. What would a best practices sharing platform look like to you? We are currently thinking of having public and private areas for collaboration, a wiki-style editing approach, and crowd-sourced contribution and moderation
3. How do we ensure broad uptake and accessibility to the best practices sharing platform? What are some example initiatives or websites that would be good to build from?

We look forward to your feedback on this exciting new initiative!

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