State Parks Are Trying to Attract More Diverse Visitors
Marsha Mercer | The Pew Charitable Trusts | May 31, 2022
As Americans plan their summer vacations, states around the country are struggling with a persistent challenge: how to attract more Black residents and other visitors of color to their parks.
The racial gap in park visitation is longstanding: Officials estimate that about 3 in 4 visitors to America’s state and national parks are White, well above the population rate of 60%. But since the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 sparked a national reckoning on race, state leaders have intensified their efforts to increase diversity. The coronavirus pandemic has further sharpened the focus on access to state parks, state officials say.
“We all want our user base to be as diverse as possible. It hasn’t been,” said Rodney Franklin, director of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s Parks Division, in an interview.
Federal officials have made similar efforts. The National Park Service in 2013 opened an Office of Relevancy, Diversity and Inclusion and has developed several African American history sites, including in 2017 the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in New York and the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland, where federal and state agencies operate a visitor center together.
In addition to equity and social justice, public health is at stake. Studies suggest millions of Black and Hispanic Americans miss out on the health benefits of being in nature—stress reduction, weight control and physical exercise among them—because they lack access to parks. Those add up to larger health costs.
States have used various strategies to increase diversity, including building new parks in underserved areas and creating panels to recommend ways to encourage people of color to participate in outdoor recreation. State parks give away free park passes, lend camping equipment, teach families how to put up a tent and make a campfire, invite community influencers such as pastors to visit parks, fund groups that organize outdoors trips for diverse groups of visitors and sponsor Black History Month events.
Since 2020, more state park systems have hired diversity and inclusion coordinators and are seeking to recruit more diverse staff and open new parks closer to urban areas to meet demand. And many leaders agree that if visitors see staff at state parks who look like them, they will feel more comfortable.
For example, in Texas, already a state where fewer than half the residents are non-Hispanic White, the parks agency has set up employee affinity groups to explore how to make the workforce more diverse.
Franklin is secretary-treasurer of the National Association of State Park Directors, which in September 2020 sponsored a webinar intended to raise awareness about racial issues.
“People don’t even realize a career in parks is possible because they haven’t been exposed,” said Franklin, who is Black. “My family didn’t take me camping.” Instead, he got interested in the outdoors through scouting.
“I’m here because someone thought enough of me to invite me to become an intern in high school,” he said. In that role, he mowed grass, gave tours and found a career.
Myron Floyd, now dean of the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University, co-led the wide-ranging webinar discussion, which asked big-picture questions such as, “How do we get to the point where Black visitors are not an anomaly in state parks?” The session encouraged officials to consider how Black people perceive their parks, how they prepare their visits and how they are treated.
State parks’ focus on low-income people from diverse backgrounds is important, Floyd said in an interview, but he warned against limiting outreach.
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