By encouraging open communication about sensitive issues between staff and participants, we can affect positive social change. Although many recreation programs have moved beyond the heavy emphasis of competitive sports programming, others seem to be hopelessly entrenched by this type of program format. The competitive program format is often an ineffective approach to bringing groups together. Instead, groups are divided and subdivided as winners and losers. Practitioners are challenged to use program formats that encourage the development of cross-cultural skills and communication, such as classes, workshops, special events, open facility, and resource centers.
Bookstores offer great innovative resources for team-building activities and initiative games.
Team-building activities and initiative games are especially valuable to those wishing to celebrate diversity because these games not only are intellectually and physically challenging, but they require participants to take emotional risks as well. We are all products of our own cultures. We see people and things in the ways that we have been conditioned to see them. All too often, innocently and inadvenently, we tend to draw conclusions about others based on our own limited, yet biased, cultural perspectives. We must learn to motivate ourselves to study other cultures, enhance relationships, and develop cross-cultural skills that will help us to develop a greater appreciation of cultural diversity and other differences as we plan programs for recreation and leisure.