In April of 2010, President Barack Obama announced the America's Great Outdoors Initiative to help reconnect Americans to nature. More than 100,000 people provided their input, which was synthesized in President Obama's recently released America's Great Outdoors Report.

Of particular interest to the administration was the relationship between children and nature, warranting a separate report of responses gathered during 21 youth listening sessions.

Young people showed a strong desire to spend more time outdoors, and talked about the challenges that made outdoor recreation difficult or inaccessible to them. Some saw parks as uninviting or irrelevant because they or their families lacked environmental knowledge or lacked the means to travel to parks. They worried about the safety of parks or how they could even reach one and noted that there isn't enough outdoor education or recreation in schools to make them feel comfortable in nature. Also of concern was the difficulty in finding government jobs in conservation and that applying to these positions is daunting.

Young people offered suggestions for improving their experience with nature:

• Develop more user-friendly websites for parks, along with innovative tools like nature-based cell phone applications.
• Lower park entry fees to make them more accessible to youth and families.
• Improve access to parks by expanding public transportation options to reach more remote destinations, and develop safe walking routes to urban and suburban parks.
• Make parks more welcoming and safe by maintaining infrastructure, cleaning up garbage, and working with communities to reduce criminal activity in parks.
• Streamline the federal hiring process and encourage more youth to apply to conservation jobs.
• Build a modern Youth Conservation Corps to engage Americans in environmental stewardship and conservation.
• Provide more opportunities for kids to get outside during school, through curriculum-based activities, service-learning projects, outdoor recess and P.E.

The next step of the initiative is to work with a range of partners to implement the recommendations of the report. To read the America's Great Outdoors report, click here.>>