National Extension Outdoor Recreation Working Group
NERCRD is supporting a new initiative emerging from its collaboration with the National Extension Tourism Network, in response to the recently announced USDA Interagency Memorandum of Understanding on Supporting the Nation’s Outdoor Recreation Economy (MOU). The MOU states that building the U.S. recreation economy is one of the USDA’s top priorities and calls on the RRDCs to implement the MOU. To that end, NERCRD and NET co-hosted an outdoor recreation national networking meeting in November 2022 that resulted in the creation of the National Extension Outdoor Recreation Working Group (NEORWG).
A primary objective of this group is to convene a community of Extension professionals to engage with the goals of the MOU (PDF).
More recently, NERCRD organized and hosted three NEORWG steering committee meetings and has supported this steering committee as they establish a vision and mission for the NEORWG.
As of October 11, this group is planning to work in their respective regions to develop regional pilot projects that will leverage the MOU. Each regional group will work with their respective RRDC to develop a funding proposal based on the pilot project.
Funding Agency: NERCRD's staff support of this effort is funded by the NERCRD core grant from USDA NIFA.
Principal Investigator: NEORWG Co-chairs: Doug Arbogast, West Virginia University and Jake Powell, Utah State University
Start Date: November, 2022