Last month, Erin Gaines, Industry and Government Relations Strategist for Oregon State University’s Center for the Outdoor Recreation Economy (CORE), joined Chris Perkins, Senior Director for Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (ORR), to co-host a webinar titled, “How Investments in Outdoor Recreation Build Resilient Economies, Jobs, and Communities.” Their presentation was designed to help attendees.

Oregon State University’s Center for the Outdoor Recreation Economy (CORE) has joined other leading recreation organizations as the newest member of Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (ORR). As ORR’s first higher education member, OSU’s CORE will bring the bandwidth and expertise of a top-tier public university to the $788 billion outdoor recreation industry, supporting the sector’s research and.

A Conversation with Chris Perkins and Cailin O'Brien-Feeney Last year, we partnered with Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (ORR) to produce a Rural Development Toolkit to help rural communities build a recreation economy that supports local aspirations. To dig a little more deeply into both the new toolkit in the context of Oregon’s rural communities, we recently sat down with ORR’s researcher, Chris.

With the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act (GAOA), the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) now has a guaranteed source for $900 million in mandatory annual funding for outdoor recreation and conservation projects across the nation. That’s great news, but it also raises big questions about the best way to invest those much-needed funds. The Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (ORR).

This year has been full of twists and turns. We've made progress anyway.

In partnership with the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (ORR), we have been surveying the industry since April and aggregating data to measure the impacts of COVID-19 on the recreation economy as a whole. Our most recent findings tell the story of an impressive, if still fragile, recovery.

By Lee Davis, Executive Director The outdoor recreation economy has been devastated in unique ways by the layered impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. This is a huge problem for the people whose livelihoods are directly tied to outdoor recreation, and a blow to the rural communities that have been buoyed by recreation dollars. This is a crisis, to be sure, but it’s also an opportunity