Passport to Winter Fun

The winter weather has subsided and the snow is long gone, but staff members at the Upper Valley Trails Alliance in Norwich, Vermont sit in an office surrounded by 350 stuffed polar bears. The bears are the incentive portion of the organization's Passport to Winter Fun project. Upper Valley Trails Alliance, an Active Living by Design community partnership, convenes Upper Valley landowners, trail, land protection and civic groups to support all trails and to create a cohesive trail network in the Upper Valley area of Vermont and New Hampshire.

Passport to Winter Fun is designed to encourage elementary school-aged children and their families to become more active outdoors during the winter months. The passport is an 18-page booklet containing a 30-step drawing of a trail. Participants move one step along the trail each day they engage in 60 minutes or more of outdoor physical activity. In addition to the trail, the passport provides a list of ideas for winter sports, a way to record achieving each new step through travel diary entries and drawings, and a series of incentives that encourage children and families to regularly spend an hour or more outside enjoying the winter. Now in its third season, the 2008 Passport to Winter Fun program ran from mid-January to the beginning of March.

Since the inception of the program, the partnership began to understand how to reach children more effectively. Though intended primarily for children, the first run of the passport was utilized mostly by adults. During this initial year they learned that using graphics, pictures, and child-friendly design was the best way to engage children. A local artist was commissioned to create drawings for the new passport. The partnership also found schools to be the most effective and efficient means of distribution. Though schools were the most logical way to reach children, they still had to find ways to ease the implementation burden on school administration, staff, and teachers. The partnership now comes to each school once a year to do a presentation on physical activity, the passport program, and prizes.

Children can fill the passport in a number of ways: walking to school, hiking with their family, being a part of the local cross-country ski team, or simply playing outside during recess. As they progress along the trail, children "turn into" a winter goose, a snowshoe hare, a winter fox, and finally, a polar bear. To keep participants motivated along the trail, each new level offers a reward. Local businesses such as the Dartmouth Cross Country Ski Center, the Hartford Municipal Arena, the Nordic Skater, and Wilderness Trails provided free passes and/or equipment rentals. Passes and rentals gave participants a free day of cross country skiing, skating, swimming, climbing, or tubing.

Even with fun incentives along the way, the children are most excited about the ultimate prize: a teddy bear. Trail Programs Director John Taylor says the kids like outdoor equipment such as skis and snowshoes but "kids just want something cool, something that is warm and cuddly." A brainstorming session with Taylor and colleagues led them to the Vermont Teddy Bear Company. The organization soon formed a partnership with the toy company, and they agreed to provide one stuffed bear to each school as an incentive to be raffled to the 350 participants during the second season of the program. Vermont Teddy Bear pledged to contribute 350 bears for the following year.

At the conclusion of the third season of the Passport to Winter Fun program, the Upper Valley Trails Alliance received 550 completed passports. "It's that good ol' polar bear that got people motivated," Taylor said. The 350 bears will be given to winners during a drawing this month, and all children who completed the passport will receive a "Polar Bear Achiever" t-shirt. Looking ahead, the partnership is considering ways to make the successful program more sustainable. They hope to extend the program to the whole family, and they hope to engage physical activity instructors and school nurses with complementary curricula

Resources

Upper Valley Community Partnership Profile

Upper Valley Trails Alliance

Passport to Winter Fun Program

Vermont Teddy Bear Company