Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (ORR) is teaming up with the Richard King Mellon Foundation for its next phase in helping rural communities build and make their local economies more resilient through outdoor recreation.
According to the RV Industry Association, the partnership ensures that ORR can continue to provide support, information and resources to rural communities seeking to create economic opportunities by developing and improving their outdoor recreation amenities. The Richard King Mellon Foundation, demonstrating its commitment to recreation, conservation and innovative partnerships, is providing $100,000 to the effort to support ORR’s work and provide grants for rural communities.
The new partnership will also include updating and expanding the widely popular Rural Economic Development Toolkit, a resource developed in partnership with the Oregon State University Center for the Outdoor Recreation Economy and The VF Foundation. Over the next year, ORR will add to the toolkit new success stories, grant opportunities, best practices, testimonials, stakeholder feedback, community self-assessment tools, examples of public-private partnerships and an updated list of federal and state grants and technical assistance related to outdoor recreation economy development.
In addition, this support will enable ORR to launch the second round of its successful grant program in summer 2023 to supply small matching grants and in-kind technical assistance to rural communities with compelling recreation economy plans. For communities with big plans and limited bandwidth, grants like these can help unlock federal, state and local match dollars like the Recreation Economy for Rural Communities (RERC) Program, a partnership between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Forest Service, Northern Border Regional Commission and Appalachian Regional Commission. This year’s cohort of 25 new RERC communities will be eligible to apply for ORR grants.
These efforts will be complemented by ORR’s association and business members from across the $862 billion outdoor recreation economy, who can provide in-kind resources on best practices and strategies to develop high-quality recreation infrastructure.
