Recreate Recreation Videos

About the Program

Category: Children and Youth (Best in Category)

Year: 2021

As of the first week of March 2020, Orange County Parks and Recreation was hosting approximately 500 programs, 60 sports leagues and 45 special events annually, while serving 13 million residents and visitors across 106 parks, trails and facilities. At the time, Parks’ Twitter account promoted these events to 1,600 followers. By March 14, 2020, Parks management began to cancel all programs and events, and marketing staff began to retweet Orange County Government health-related initiatives. With Orange County’s shelter-in-place order from March 26 to April 9, the Parks and Recreation team had to find a new way to connect to families now stuck at home. Management approved having recreational staff make fun, creative videos, entitled “Recreate Recreation” – #RecreateRecreation – to be posted on Twitter; the in-house graphic artist would edit and limit the time to one minute or less. As evidenced by the millions of people using our 40 miles of paved trails during April and May 2020 when COVID closures were in place and our recreation centers were closed, area residents and visitors to Orlando sought out Parks and Recreation space for personal and family activities. While the stay-home order only lasted a few weeks, school-aged children were now home for the remainder of the school year and in need of activities. By June 22 Recreation staff at 12 sites had created 51 videos, each about a minute in length, on a variety of topics: fitness and sports, animals, arts and crafts, games, gardening, photography and the historical park’s structures, antiques and toys.