It is an exciting time to be a part of serving our communities together in Illinois!

The recent IPRA board meeting was focused on strategy planning for 2016-2020. As we look back at 2015, here are some of our accomplishments this year:

We rolled out a new speaker management system for our conference, making it easier for volunteers and staff to review and manage all the proposals that come in. We also began developing a mobile app for our upcoming January conference. Conference this year will have a fantastic closing social on the Odyssey Cruise. - yes, imagine a cruise in January in Chicago. It will be just like a memorable New Year’s Eve all over again!

In membership, we have more professional members than we have had in recent history going back to 2011 or before. We conducted a three-month free trial membership last fall and rolled out a discount for our non-Chicago Metro members. 

We rolled out our new online communities, IPRAConnect and now have 14 communities to serve specific interest areas for our members. This also allows us to reduce the amount of email we send to focus on the most important only and the rest are done through segmented marketing. 

We continue to build relationships with our friends in other associations, like Illinois Afterschool Network, as well as our friends at the American Camp Association-IL and our park and recreation association colleagues in other states. In fact, IPRA’s webinar series now has attendees from seven states, and one of our in-person training programs even had someone from Germany attend! We also continue to build our relationships with colleges and universities in Illinois, who are training the next generation of park and recreation professionals. 

We rolled out our new mentoring program, ProConnect. It had a 97% satisfaction rating, and 24% of those who were not already executive directors were promoted in the year since they applied for the program.  IPRA won a national award for innovation for ProConnect in its first year. We even expanded it to roll it out in far Southern Illinois too with ProConnect South. This program is in partnership with University of St. Francis in Joliet. 

We have streamlined all of our scholarships into one process, making it easier for students and professionals to apply for this continuing education funding source.

We continue to communicate about parks and recreation all over the country. In fact, we are so proud that the PhD student we have been working with these last two years, Gus Hallmon, will be presenting his research and representing us in Missouri and in Canada in the coming months. 

It is an exciting time to be a part of serving our communities together in Illinois. For more information go to www.ilipra.org