NRPA helps educate Congress on need for recreation programs for persons with disabilities - Advocacy Update - National Recreation and Park Association - Brief Article

Parks & Recreation, August, 2002

Congress should restore and increase therapeutic recreation grants through the Rehabilitation Services Administration, NRPA emphasized at a Capitol Hill briefing on July 11. NRPA sponsored the briefing in conjunction with The Alliance for Disability, Sport and Recreation. NRPA Executive Director T. Destry Jarvis and Jean Driscoll, 8-time winner of the wheelchair division of the Boston Marathon, addressed the crowd of congressional aides.

Also that day, members of the alliance, including NRPA staff, met with more than 20 legislators and staff in the House and the Senate to get legislators to sign on to a "Dear Colleague" letter asking the Appropriation Subcommittee for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education to reinstate the program at $5 million. In June, more than 20 members of the House signed on to a similar letter. As a result of the briefing and Hill visits on July 11, NRPA anticipates that a similar letter will circulate in the Senate.

The RSA recreation program provides seed money to initiate or develop therapeutic recreation programs that most likely would never receive local funding. Once local jurisdictions see the need for these programs, they support them with local funds after the grants expire. This has been the case in more than 75 percent of the funded programs.

Although the RSA recreation pro gram has been funded for the past 18 years, President Bush proposed no funds for it in the Department of Education's Fiscal Year '03 budget. The program was funded at $2.6 million for this fiscal year, yet even that amount falls short of the program's needs--only six to eight grants have been able to be funded most years out of the hundreds of applications.