4.1 Planning With Purpose
The most skilled program-planners design recreation-based programs and events with intention and purpose. Programming with purpose ensures that participants will be provided the opportunity to experience some personal meaning, learning, growth or development. Purposeful programming can include ambitions or aspirations around:
- Improved physical fitness
- Play that promotes prosocial behaviour
- Increasing personal resilience
- Community-building
- Fundraising
- Emotional and mental wellness
- Amplifying an educational message
Programming with purpose is a quality-assurance measure – the best programs always have meaning! When we use the word ‘program’ in recreation, it implies that the activity has a specific start and end time, a specific date and location, and some kind of leader or facilitator. Programs with no clear purpose are the first to go when budgets are cut or funds are limited. Often, the purpose of a program or event can be found in its goals – broad-based statements of intention or ambition for the future. Goal setting helps recreation professionals and the organizations they work for stay motivated to satisfy the greater purpose.
Developing and achieving goals can be an exciting and rewarding process for the program-planner. Goals can be short-term (achievable within a day, a week or over a couple of months) or long-term (achievable over several months or many years). When created correctly, goals can help provide a certain structure to a given program that will allow individuals and/or organizations to achieve a desired state or outcome. Note: Not all leisure or recreation-based activities must be overtly purposeful or goal-driven! Indulging in unstructured activities in one’s leisure time, like strolling through a community garden, stopping in at a playground to play on the swings, star-gazing, or making snow angels, do not require tangible goals to make them meaningful. For leisure activities such as these, as there is no designated start or end time, no budget to adhere to, and no facilitation schedule, so goals are unnecessary. In these instances, the making of meaning is individualized and personal. The participant is obliged to please no one except themselves.
On the other hand, when professional programmers write goals for structured recreation programs, they are required to consider their obligations and commitments. Obligations and commitments can include serving the needs of the participants, serving the needs of the larger community, upholding the recreation organization’s Mission, Vision and Core Values, or being held accountable to adhering to set budget parameters.
TYPES OF GOALS
Depending on the nature and scope of a recreation-based program or special event, it may have specific types of goals that lend meaning and purpose to the activity:
- *Societal Goals (“to reduce childhood obesity and raise public awareness of the importance of healthy eating”)
- *Agency or Organizational Goals (“to offer participation opportunities to all members of the organization, regardless of income”)
- *Programmatic Goals (“to reduce the negative impacts of social anxiety by offering structured courses in mindfulness and meditation”)
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Goal Statements
Depending on who you’re talking to, the goals of an organization, its program leaders, and the participants might be very different. The organization, whose Core Values include celebrating diversity, may hope its youth program brings in participants of differing abilities and ethnicities. The program leader may echo the organization’s goal and have a personal goal of ensuring 100% participant safety and wellbeing with no incidents or accidents. Finally, the participants: There is a good chance none will be aware of the goals of the greater organization or the leader, and may simply be in attendance because their parents made them attend or just to have fun.
Goal statements tend to be broad, vision-based, and abstract. They provide a view of the big picture. This is why goal statements are frequently followed by “objectives” – actionable, specific, and easy-to-measure statements of intent that act as stepping stones to achieving the big picture outlined in the larger goal statement. Where a goal statement provides an outline of the dream, objectives provide the fine details, measurements and deadlines that will help achieve the dream. When goals are formally articulated and written down, they act as a kind of achievement roadmap and can be used as a progress-checking tool toward achievement. When goal statements and objectives come together, we call them SMART Goals.
