26 Jul Week 6 – The RTCA

  This week I met with Nick, a Conservation Legacy intern who is here at the Intermountain Regional Office working with the National Park Service’s Rivers, Trails, and Conservation Assistance (RTCA) program for the summer. We are putting together a brochure to share with our local partners to let them know about the RTCA program. They are sort of like the community outreach arm of the Park Service. “Our national network of conservation and recreation planning professionals partners with community groups, nonprofits, tribes, and state and local governments to design trails and parks, conserve and improve access to rivers, protect special places, and create recreation opportunities.” – RTCA website I knew a little bit about the RTCA from when I worked at Valley Forge National Historical Park. I had helped with a program called Canoemobile in 2015, which brought kids in cities onto urban waterways. Usually it was their first time out in a boat, or at least in a canoe. Canoemobile was made possible through a partnership between the RTCA and an organization called Wilderness Inquiry.  

We got lucky in that the RTCA is already working on a brochure we can build off of, and discussed what we would do differently in our brochure to make sure it is useful to our audience. Our first idea was to switch up some of the photos to show a more diverse group of people, so that we can show people of different backgrounds enjoying or working on the projects the RTCA assists with. Another idea was to tailor our brochures a bit. We want to add an image and short caption explaining a project RTCA helped with. The Intermountain Regional Office covers eight states, so we could produce a slightly different brochure for each state. Overall the content would be the same, except for the example of an RTCA project. Brochures being distributed in Colorado would have an example of a a project completed in Colorado, and we would do that for each state. This way, a pretty general brochure will hopefully turn into something an organization can relate to!