City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks

The City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks (RAP) will launch a Mobile Recreation Program bringing a variety of outdoor activities to communities in need. Mobile Recreation vans will provide themed programs ranging from Olympic and Paralympic sports to skateboarding and creative activities, enhancing the lives of the youth and adults that participate. The program will commence at four LAUSD elementary schools through the Community School Parks (CSP) Program and supplement RAP’s after-school programs.

The City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks (RAP) will launch a Mobile Recreation Program to bring a variety of outdoor activities to children and families in underserved communities. Each Mobile Recreation Vehicle will provide differently themed activities ranging from sports to drama and dance to STEM activities. The program will commence on the weekends at four LAUSD elementary schools in high park-need areas through the Departments Community School Parks Program.

Open Water Junior Lifeguard Program provides professional lifeguard instruction to youth in water safety and physical conditioning as an introduction to a potential career choice as water rescuers.

LA Dance Immersion connects the arts, specifically dance, with communities through an intensive program that increases youth opportunity for fundamental dance training in economically disadvantaged communities, educates youth & their families in dance appreciation, dance history, stretching and strengthening, & healthy behaviors & nutrition, and trains young adults to be instructors at a professional level to ensure sustainability of this program after the grant period is complete.

I would like to see indoor play parks at various parks throughout the City of LA. The play parks would be designed for children that are baby, infant, and toddler ages and would provide a safe, indoor environment as a relief from outdoor factors (weather, transients, etc). Portable play equipment and mats would provide appropriate levels of play for smaller children to express themselves and play physically while protecting them from their surroundings and allowing for easy clean-up.

Geared for youth ages 9-17, the Open Water Junior Lifeguard Program operates during the summer at two open water locations within the City. Taught by certified lifeguards, our Program is competitive and rigorous, providing instruction in physical conditioning, competition skills, and the use of professional lifesaving equipment. Our Program is designed to educate and impassion youth to appreciate and respect the marine environment and introduce youth to a career choice in water safety.

The mission of the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks (RAP) is to enrich the lives of the residents of Los Angeles by providing safe, welcoming parks and recreation facilities and affordable, diverse recreation and human services activities for people of all ages to play, learn, contemplate, build community and be good stewards of our environment. We desire to provide day camp scholarships to over 1,000 youth ages 5 – 17, in the summer of 2013. From June 10, 2013 to August 9, 2013 over 75,000 youth will register at RAP summer camps that provide youth enrichment activities including but not limited to computer training classes, environmental awareness and education, mentoring, sports, team building, hands-on outdoor and camping activities, arts and crafts, aquatics, fishing, hiking, and life skills. RAP operates American Camping Association (ACA) accredited residential camps at Griffith Park Boys Camp and Camp Hollywoodland for Girls, both situated in one of the largest parks in North America. The majority of our summer day camps are located among our 184 recreation centers that dispersed over 457 square miles of the City of Los Angeles (City) Studies show all children lose ground academically during the summer, and the achievement gap is even more striking for low-income children (Cooper 1996). Richard Rothstein, former national education columnist for The New York Times, and now a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute, agrees "disadvantaged children get less educational support in summers and after school." His research confirms this differential "summer setback" occurs partly because middle-class children's learning is reinforced in the summer months — they read more, travel, and learn new social and emotional skills in camps and organized athletics" (Rothstein 2005). Day camp scholarships will help to close this gap by offering affordable Out of School Time (OST) enrichment programming to youth in Los Angeles during summer vacation months. RAP has over 100 years of programming experience and use models of informal learning opportunities that psychologists and academia are beginning to understand. It is no coincidence that the Latin word “campus” (field) reveals the link between school campuses and campsites. These two institutions not only share a common root, but together account for countless hours of engagement and influential experience for American children and adults (Ozier, 2010). Dr. Edmund Gordon, one of the founders of the Head Start Program contends supplemental educational experiences are vital to all children and are closely associated with "exposure to family and community-based activities and learning experiences that occur both in and out of school" (Gordon 2005).