NORC (national outdoor recreation conference)

You may be a business owner or organization who competes for seasonal staff and high performing returnees to offer memorable river experiences, or a leader of seasonal crews who spend a compact summer river season working in remote locations and close quarters. You may rely on several metrics and feedback loops to know if your staff members are thriving as a team and community, and are pleased at knowing that you have a record of receiving no sexual harassment complaints from your staff or customers as evidence of your healthy work environment. That's not a good number.

We will share results of qualitative research conducted among whitewater rafting professionals about negotiating gender in the whitewater profession in the context of the working environment, including workplace stories that may be familiar to other outdoor professionals. We'll review awareness and training practices that enable business owners, service providers, managers or group/team leaders to offer welcoming workspaces and build employee retention success.

Session leaders will encourage feedback and reflection, and we will suggest a few planning tools, training and practical tips you can take back to their home river, trail or planning office.

Attendees will be able to

1. understand elements of workspace environments that support incidents of sexual and other harassment;
2. understand tenets of change that can shift the environment to one of organizational trust and intolerance of the traditional status quo; and
3. learn from workplace experiences that support the development and reliance on harassment-related policy and procedure.