The Vancouver Park Board’s Leisure Access Program offers low-income residents an opportunity to access programs and services at a reduced rate. Our project focused on helping the Park Board understand what prevents residents who qualify for this program from participating in it. 

We focused on the neighborhood of Renfrew-Collingwood as a pilot project; the design and recommendations we have given will serve as a template to be similarly applied throughout the rest of Vancouver and guide the Park Board’s strategy in boosting participation. 

For this, we prepared a survey to be distributed to people in the neighborhood, asking questions that relate to their interest in leisure activities as well as potential barriers. 

We recommended ways the Park Board can work on getting high numbers of quality responses from the survey; we emphasized distributing the survey online (on social media) and in person with a tablet at different points in the neighborhood.

We further recommend that the Park Board consults and collaborates with organizations in the neighborhood prior to and while conducting the survey to learn what they think of the LAP and to draw from local knowledge and strengthen relationships.

Our project is driven by the belief that engaging the beneficiaries of the LAP program in the decision-making process is crucial; listening to the populations that the program serves to improves the quality of the program.