The Illinois Park and Recreation Association is please to announce a great new resource for its members - the IPRA Guide to Internships.

The IPRA Guide to Internships began as a University of St. Francis class project for IPRA member and Homewood-Flossmoor Park District Recreation Supervisor, Lee Ann Fisk. The class was Senior Seminar, a preparation class for internships. At the time, she was supervising interns at the Orland Park Recreation Department. She had searched the department for a manual for both the intern and herself. There was one, but the information was geared towards recruiting interns instead of guiding. It became apparent that a perfect project for the class was to develop a guide to creating internship manuals. Her professor, Dr. Sydney Sklar, approved the project and the work began.

Fisk reviewed hard copies of internship manuals from best practice agencies and universities. Interviews were conducted with educators from universities, responsible for recreation interns and recreation students fresh in the field. The results were positive that, in fact, a guide like this was needed. To further the justification for this guide, a survey was created and with the support of IPRA.

The survey was sent to 391 administrators; consisting of directors, superintendents and human resource managers. The main questions consisted of:

• Does your agency offer internships?
• Does your agency have an internship manual?
• If they did not have a manual, would they be interested in a guide to create one?
• And if they had a manual, would they offer it to be reviewed for the project?

The results stated that out of 147 respondents:

• 73.5% of the agencies have an internship program
• 60.3% do not have an internship manual
• Out of those without manuals, 88.5% of the agencies would be interested in this guide
• 84% of those with manuals offered them for review

The response was overwhelming and validated this project.

IPRA and the University of St Francis began to see a potential use for this guide for the recreation professional. Close to a final draft, the project was introduced at the College and University Relations Committee Summit last April. Several positive ideas came from that introduction. It was introduced at the National Recreation and Park Association Congress during a session called “Competency Based Internship” held by Chris Nunes, Director of Recreation at the Community Associations of the Woodlands and Amy Hurd, Illinois State University. It was also shared at the IPRA Supervisor Symposium in October.

Throughout the process, Fisk worked with Dr. Sydney Sklar and Dr. Lyle Hicks to assure this publication would be a professional and useful tool. At this point, the rightful place for disseminating this guide is with IPRA.

We hope that you will find this comprehensive IPRA Guide to Internships manual a great tool in getting your agency started in creating an internship manual to help assure a successful program for our young professionals.

The IPRA Guide To Internships is available to members of the association via the member’s only Resource Library. To download your free copy, simply login to the IPRA site, click on the Resource Library button and search within the Internships folder. Included is the actual manual and a user-friendly supplement document to help you get started.

(Note: if you have troubles logging in to the IPRA site, please use the “forget password?” or “login assistance?” links provided on the main page.)

We welcome your feedback on this IPRA resource. Please feel free to post your comments here.

A special thanks to Lee Ann Fisk, Dr. Sydney Sklar and Dr. Lyle Hicks for their work on this project. We hope this will prove to be a great resource for the members of IPRA. Enjoy!