Bringing Nature and History To The Homebound and Disabled

About the Program

Category: Parks and Recreation (Best in Category)

Year: 2021

What can be said about the pandemic? In our area, Union County, New Jersey, it’s been devastating with nearly 10,000 lives lost and countless businesses crushed. As tragic as it’s been, it also reinforced how important our parks are to our well-being. We are seeing record numbers of visitors to our parks. But we also had to wrestle with the closing of our facilities so that now our Stable, our Deserted Village Visitor Center, our Trailside Nature & Science Center, our historic sites, were off-limits.But there was something else that really hit us: When the pandemic passed and our facilities reopened, not everyone would share that joyous moment.In Union County, we have an estimated 50,000 residents with disabilities. We have a thousand residents receiving Meals on Wheels. And even for those who have ways to get out, most of the centuries-old historic sites cannot accommodate wheel chairs; and as one can imagine, a walk in the woods is totally out of the question.For our disabled population, what the rest of the world is experiencing now, is their normal. Parks & Recreation, which includes its Office of Cultural & Heritage Affairs, realized this had to change. Union County is a fully wired urban/suburban county and the vast majority of the disabled have access to wi-fi, so while they could not come to us physically, they could visit virtually. So Parks launched a two-prong program, with Trailside producing a host of online nature programs and Cultural & Heritage creating video tours of historic sites. With these new additions to the County website, it is now possible to learn all about bugs and birds, along with other wildlife adventures, or, as just one of many options, “visit” Boxwood Hall in Elizabeth, where George Washington dined with his old friend Elias Boudinot before heading to New York to be sworn in as the nation’s first president.