By Stephanne Musser
As collegiate recreation students and professionals, we know that a well-maintained and welcoming recreational facility can and should be right at the heart of a great college campus.
Students and faculty alike come to rely on their facility as a resource for their personal health and fitness, a center for entertainment and games including club and intramural sports, and as an outlet for the stresses and pressures of demanding academic schedules.
Share resources and engage with colleagues around facility planning, construction, and design in the NIRSA Facilities Community of Practice. Photo courtesy of Missouri State University.We know that creating a welcoming, inclusive, sustainable space for students to play and learn is a priority for most of us in our day-to-day work, and NIRSA’s Facilities Community of Practice Work Team has been working on developing robust and relevant resources to support each other’s efforts. Our Work Team has recently made significant progress compiling and organizing resources for the Facilities Community of Practice Resource Library; but we need your help to make this resource even stronger!
Within the Facilities Community of Practice, which is open to all current NIRSA members, you will find the “Library,” which has recently been organized into a variety of categories (folders) ranging from job descriptions to sustainability. We would like your assistance in populating the library with useful information that you’d be willing to share with your NIRSA colleagues.
In addition to populating this resource library, NIRSA needs your help spreading the word about the Facilities Community of Practice and the existence of its library among your colleagues and students who may not yet be connected to our online community. Joining is easy; simply login to your NIRSA account, and enter the community through the portal on this page. If it’s your first time visiting, you will be prompted to “Join Community” at the top of the page; after clicking on the icon to join, you will be asked to select your communication preference for the community—this means you can stay up to date on discussion postings in this community in real time, daily, or at your own leisure.
Facilities Community of Practice Work Team at NIRSA 2014
While the Facilities Community of Practice is open for active discussion 365 days a year, the NIRSA Annual Conference is a special opportunity for campus recreation facilities students and professionals to exchange ideas and share best practices in person. There will be a number of sessions at NIRSA 2014 focused on campus recreation facility management, planning, and design (search NIRSA 2014 ed sessions by topic), including a roundtable discussion facilitated by members of the Facilities Community of Practice Work Team.
We’d love to get your suggestions for discussion topics for that roundtable. If you have a topic related to campus recreation facilities, let us know: email your ideas to the Work Team and we’ll do our best to integrate your topic into the conversation in Nashville. The Facilities Roundtable is scheduled to take place at 2:30pm on Friday, April 25—we hope to see you there!
And if you want more facility-specific networking, information, and state-of-the-art inspiration and ideas, be sure to check out the 2014 NIRSA Facilities Institute being held in Houston, TX this October.
