On December 20th, 2013 the Association of Outdoor Recreation and Education, and the Outdoor Orientation Program Symposium/Adventure Orientation announced their organizational combination. This collaboration was put in place to meet the objectives of both organizations.
AORE agreed to take the Outdoor Orientation Program Symposium [OOPS]/Adventure Orientation [AO] as a program under the Association of Outdoor Recreation and Education. AORE took on all operation responsibility including managing the OOPS budget, providing adequate liability and insurance policies, allocating staff time, office resources, creating and implementing a strategic plan, developing a business plan, managing the web presence and implementing marketing and advertising strategies.
OOPS/AO then agreed to continue to develop educational content, pursue establishing a curriculum, conduct census research every 5-6 years, partner to create with Brent Bell and the University of New Hampshire – The Outdoor Orientation Benchmarking Survey [TOOBS], continue to re-brand the Adventure Orientation in response to the diversity of programs, and develop an OOPS Program Peer Review. AORE would help promote outdoor orientation and adventure orientation
programs at colleges through the resources of AORE and development of strategic working groups such as work to acquire Presidential support and endorsement.
In its inaugural year, OOPS provided a learning experience for the National Office. It was an extremely collaborative year, and was very rewarding as we worked together to hammer out the kinks. Much of the year was spent building infrastructure, support and in the development of timelines and templates. As OOPS had not previously had much infrastructure to support its programs, a lot of time was taken to write Standard Operating Procedures [SOP] and begin the process to formalize the symposium events and workshops. The year 2014 was a great one for AORE and OOPS. It gave us a much deeper understanding of the operations and planning that go into each symposium and how the process can be improved upon as we work together in 2015.
Brent has done an extraordinary job building this program, creating the curriculum and building relationships with many colleges and universities that take advantage of the outdoor orientation and adventure orientation experience. It is the goal of the National Office to support OOPS not only in promotion and organization, and to meet the financial savings goal, but also to help elevate its relevance and place in the industry. 2015 will be a bright year as we look to increase efficiencies, continue to look for opportunities to share the mission of OOPS and to continue building a solid foundation and relationship between OOPS and AORE.
Outdoor Orientation Program Symposium
2014 Year in Review
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