The Company is planning to commission a high level sport and recreation group of experts to advise management on setting up our merits and awards programs, being a fundamental program for the development of the Company’s Professional Sports Standards (PSS).
The Company will adopt Canadian codes and rules and will seek affiliation with Canadian, US and international sports and recreation organizations.
The Company will participate in the engagement of volunteers, coaches and trainers programs, and is planning to improve the process by introducing innovative policies to maximize benefits and rewards to volunteers.
The Company is proud to have gained the participation of one of the world most distinguished architects, Douglas Joseph Cardinal, O.C., Ph.D. (H.C.) the internationally acclaimed and respected Canadian architect, of Métis and Blackfoot heritage as our Chief Architect and Senior Advisor. With his participation, the Company is planning several awards and citations to honor aboriginal and new Canadian players, volunteers, coaches and trainers.
The Company’s Team Building Programs are a significant tool, to structure and to promote, sports and recreational programs, to recognize and to award the dedication and talents of young players and their coaches through special citations and other distinctions.
Family Nature Parcs – WALL OF WELLNESS
At our first Parc at Ashton, we are planning to build the Wall Of Wellness. The Wall will either be of white marble or granite. The wall will be located in a garden setting surrounded with flower beds and a variety of Canadian maple trees.
On our Wall, you’ll find engraved the names of those:
Who cared for kids and their right to play.
Who donated and sponsored the economically disadvantaged and the disabled.
Who contributed to the inclusion of aboriginal and new Canadians in community sport.
Who volunteered to help themselves and others become interested in sport, and to the founders, executives and advisors of Family Nature Parcs.
The Honors Wall of Wellness
Our Global Sport Community
If you like to know more about our development plans or to share your ideas with us, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at: info@familynatureparcs.com. You may also consider to Register for FREE, to receive our periodical progress reports and news.
Thank you for visiting us, Sorry we are not ready yet to receive visitors. We are working very hard to complete the development of our website. Please return soon, we promise not to disappoint you.
The Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport commissioned this report on behalf of the True Sport Movement – Canada’s national movement for sport and community.
Our goal with this report is to provide the evidence that sport can be a powerful and positive influence in our communities. We want to help communities, policy makers at all levels, business leaders and those in sport, to see the tremendous potential that lies within our community sport system. We hope that they will work together, and come up with new approaches that put this potential to work for Canadians.
There is one very simple idea at the heart of this report – good sport can make a great difference.
The True Sport Report” outlines conclusive proof of how good sport can be used intentionally to positively influence a wide range of societal goals, including child and youth development, crime prevention, education, social inclusion and economic and environmental sustainability”.
The report demonstrates that sport can be used to influence public policy to the benefit of Canadians in the following areas:
Health
Sport can increase the number of active Canadians, and increasing physical activity levels by just 10 per cent would save Canadians over $150 million annually in direct health costs alone.
Participation in sport can stem the tide of child obesity – 10 per cent of Canadian children aged 7 -13 are currently at risk of disability, disease and premature death because they are obese.
Child and youth development
Youth involved in sport are more likely than non-athletes to eat healthily and weigh less, and less likely to smoke, use drugs, engage in sexual activity, or feel bored or hopeless.
Girls experience particular benefits from sport due to its protective effects against osteoporosis, anxiety, depression, suicide and adolescent pregnancy.
Social development
Sport can help to strengthen communities by building social capital and fostering greater inclusion of marginalized groups like the disabled.
Sport can help to facilitate the integration of newcomers.
Economic development
Sport plays a significant role in the economy of Canadian communities by providing jobs and enhancing skills and productivity.
Sport contributes to economic development and renewal. For example, in 2004 Canadian households spent $15.8 billion on sport.
Environment sustainability
Many investments in community sport are investments in green space, with users often becoming advocates for their protection, proper maintenance and expansion.
New greener standards for sport and recreation facilities are helping to ensure that sport is doing its part to make our communities more sustainable.
The Report – Executive Summary
Introduction
True Sport is a national movement for sport and community. Its core mission is to be a catalyst to help sport live up to its full potential as a public asset for Canada and Canadian society – making a significant contribution to the development of youth, the well-being of individuals, and quality of life in our communities.
There is now evidence that sport’s benefits go far beyond the positive health effects of physical activity that have long been understood. A growing body of research points to community sport’s fundamental role as a primary generator of social capital and related benefits across a broad spectrum of societal goals including education, child and youth development, social inclusion, crime prevention, economic development and environmental sustainability. Perhaps most significantly, no other domain of community life has demonstrated sport’s capacity to connect so many young people to positive adult role models and mentors, opportunities for positive development, and help in acquiring critical life skills.
Evidence documenting these benefits is causing a new picture of Canada’s community sport system to emerge – that of a critical, yet largely untapped, reservoir of public benefit that, with intentional effort, can be made to deliver even more for Canadians. To realize these benefits, though, the sport we do must be good sport, driven by positive values – when good sport is used intentionally, it can have even greater benefits.
Research indicates that this is exactly the kind of sport that the vast majority of Canadians want, understanding intuitively that this is the sport that generates the greatest benefits. True Sport undertook this research initiative in order to provide concrete evidence of these benefits – to put data and examples around this intuition and aspiration.
This report is intended to enable communities, policy makers, and business leaders to see the tremendous potential that lies within our community sport system and to catalyze new approaches that will put this potential to work for Canadians.
Publisher
True Sport,www.truesport.ca is a national movement for sport and community. Its core mission is to be a catalyst to help sport live up to its full potential as a public asset for Canada and Canadian society – making a significant contribution to the development of youth, the well-being of individuals, and quality of life in our communities. To request a copy of the report please contact: info@truesport.ca
What Sport Can Do, listen to the experts !!!
Family Nature Parcs’ mission is to Help-“Closing the gap”- requested by TrueSport Canada
If you like to know more about our development plans or to share your ideas with us, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at: info@familynatureparcs.com. You may also consider to Register for FREE to receive our periodical progress reports and news.
Thank you for visiting us, Sorry we are not ready yet to receive visitors. We are working very hard to complete the development of our website. Please return soon, we promise not to disappoint you.
Coming soon, your favourite Blog, your window to kids all over the world, exchanging sport and recreation ideas and plans, connecting with interesting kids of various cultures and nationalities, speaking wellness sports and how to remain healthy. Keep watching this website.
If you like to know more about our development plans or to share your ideas with us, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at: info@familynatureparcs.com. You may also consider to Register for FREE to receive our periodical progress reports and news.
We are planning to get your hands muddy. Children Garden – (1.5 m X 1.5 m) children age 5-12, plant their choice of vegetables and flowers, to muddy their little hands and witness some of the miracles of nature
You too, mom and dad, will have your gardening Plots 4 M X 4 M- Vegetable Plots -rented seasonally to 14 years and over
Green House – Organic Vegetables (Commercial dimension 8-10 acres) rented to third party creating their – Local Produce Market – Under a Tent – to sell their locally produced fresh vegetables during the short spring and summer seasons.
If you like to know more about our development plans or to share your ideas with us, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at: info@familynatureparcs.com. You may also consider to Register for FREE to receive our periodical progress reports and news.
We strongly object to the present practice by governments and corporate sponsors, when providing financial support to kids from economically disadvantaged families and to the disabled. The present practice, of the “means test” is wrong and humiliating, inflicting pain not only on the economically disadvantage families, but more important, on their kids who are made to feel “subsidized”.
We feel deeply that every child has a birthright to play without feeling guilty to want to play or being the cause of humiliating their families by forcing them to submit to the “means test”.
Our studies would indicate that most new Canadian and aboriginals families do not participate in sport for many reasons, the most important being the escalating costs of sports and to avoid making financial demand on the limited budget of their families.
We are planning to try to eliminate present forms of the “means test”. For the purpose of implantation of its no “means test” policy, we are planning to seek to complete the formation of a hybrid corporate status. One is a for-profit the other not-for-profit.
We are also planning to make a substantial number of seasonal vacancies in our sport facilities available FREE of charge to the economically disadvantage boys and girls, and will seek to interest governments and corporate donors to follow our initiative by matching sponsorship as may be requested by us.
We will proactively seek to raise funds from donors, hosting special fund raising events to make available opportunities for all kids to play regardless of their economic status or disability.
Our Parcs will be outdoor state-of-the-art multi-sport and recreation age-based facilities offering older adults , a place where several aged-based sport and recreation facilities offering older adults multiple choices of physical activities that will include sports, golf, walking, hiking, gardening and other pleasant facilities of fun, relaxation and good health.
With an increasing number of wellness programs for all ages being introduced around the world, it’s becoming easier for the older adults to venture to wellness destinations with health goals in mind.
From tours and retreats to weekend getaways, active adults can combine leisure, health wellness activities with healing experiences.
Activities such as consuming mineral waters for specific aches and pains, energy renewal and strength building through yoga and Tai Chi and holistic treatments.
Let Family Nature Parcs help you plan your wellness programs. We offer a variety of family friendly games and activities for the whole family!
9 Hole Par 3 golf course
Tennis
Lawn games i.e. lawn bowling & bocce, croquet
Swimming & aquatics
Picnics
Martial arts classes
Creative arts
Gardening & horticulture
Walking, biking and hiking trails
If you like to know more about our development plans or to share your ideas with us, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at: info@familynatureparcs.com. You may also consider to Register for FREE to receive our periodical progress reports and news.
Darya Eugenie Farha – March 24, 1965 – November 16, 2011
It was Darya Eugenie Farha, to whom the Ashton Family Nature Parc will be officially dedicated, who inspired her father Fred L Farha, founder and Chairman of Family Nature Parcs, to abandon his advanced plans to develop an upper scale 18 hole golf course and exclusive clubhouse facilities on his 138.4 acres located at Ashton in the city of Ottawa, Ontario Canada.
Darya reminded her dad of the outdoor Nature Parc he visited often in Sweden, which he used to describe to her as ‘an outdoor paradise of nature, sport, recreation and wellness’.
Later, it was Darya who asked her father to include, in the development plans of the first Family Nature Parcs taking place at Ashton, a large tent for 300 persons and to place the tent in a prominent place in the Parc and to call it “The Nation’s Tent”.
That was Darya’s legacy of devotion to her beloved multicultural Canada. A tent a place where all Canadians of their beautiful ethnical diversity, especially the children, come to meet other Canadians, to socialize, to witness and experience their each other true culture, language, dress, music and to bond, in the tent of one great multicultural country, Canada, as one cohesive and equal citizens.
We think it is befitting to address the business model and mission of Family Nature Parcs in relation to the present state, practice and facilities of Canadian community sports. The needed improvements in all spheres related to Canadian community sport are outlined in the well researched Backgrounders to What Sport Can Do study published by True Sport Canada. The report dealt at length with the present lack of inclusion of aboriginal and new Canadian families in community sport and recreation and the prevailing feeling of dispossession aboriginal and new Canadians feel about community sport and their almost total withdrawal from community sport and recreation.
We are pleased to share with you, few valuable selections from this authoritative report:
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT BUILDING STRONGER, MORE INCLUSIVE AND VIBRANT COMMUNITIES
Renewing Aboriginal culture
Higher rates of illness, premature mortality, school leaving, unemployment, poverty, and incarceration among Canada’s Aboriginal population reflect the significant disparities between the social, economic and cultural opportunities available to Aboriginal Canadians and those available to Canadians on the whole.
Sport has been identified by Aboriginal people and by Canada’s federal and provincial/territorial governments as an important means of helping to reduce these disparities, particularly as they affect Aboriginal youth, the fastest growing segment of Canada’s population.
There is growing evidence that cultural continuity is critical to restoring the social, economic and spiritual health of Aboriginal communities. As an important cultural feature, true sport has a role to play in this process.
Sport and games centred on traditional skills and culturally based principles have always played an important role in North American Aboriginal culture. This is reflected today in the popularity and success of sport and cultural events such as the Arctic Winter Games, the North American Indigenous Games, and the World Indigenous Nations Games.
Research from Australia confirms that sport offers particular benefits with regard to Aboriginal communities in terms of building cultural pride, social cohesion, self-esteem, and transferable skills among participants and volunteers.
Sport carnivals can also help reduce drug and alcohol use on a short-term basis, with related reductions in family violence.
Sport and recreation programs offered with other supports have also helped to increase school attendance and achievement levels, and reduce the incidence of youth crime and suicide.
Once again we know that it must be sport founded on the positive values of fun, fairness, inclusion and excellence – true sport has the power to help.
Helping newcomers to integrate more quickly into Canadian society
There is strong evidence that newcomers to Canada are experiencing greater difficulty integrating into their new communities and the Canadian labour market than their predecessors of 20 years ago.
UK research on sport and the inclusion of refugees and asylum seekers shows that sport can help to break down barriers between newcomers and local host populations, improve relationships among asylum seekers of diverse ethnic backgrounds, and build their self-esteem and self-confidence.
Sport is also being used successfully to link newcomers to key community services and supports such as health centres, recreation programs, ESL courses, childcare, and local universities.
The Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants has identified sport and recreation as important tools for the integration of immigrant youth and developed an inclusive recreational model for immigrant and refugee youth to serve as the basis for partnerships between sport and recreation organizations and immigrant serving agencies.
Fostering greater inclusion of people with disabilities
People with disabilities face many forms of social, economic and political exclusion. Even in the absence of negative stereotypes and discriminatory attitudes, people without disabilities may underestimate the capacities of people with disabilities and feel unsure about how to accommodate and include them in day-to-day activities.
True Sport helps to remove these barriers by changing community perceptions of people with disabilities, focusing attention on their abilities rather than their disability.
Sport also changes the player with a disability. As a result of exclusion, people with disabilities may have fewer opportunities to acquire important social skills and to fully develop their physical and mental potential. Through sport, they can:
Access opportunities for positive social interaction with peers with and without disabilities, make friends, and build social networks vital to their health and wellbeing;
Learn vital social interaction skills such as communication, cooperation, teamwork, the importance of rules, goal setting, and self-discipline;
Become physically stronger with improved stamina, coordination, flexibility, posture, muscle tone, balance, strength, and movement;
Enhance their social-emotional development and capacity for self-help, acquiring greater emotional control, social awareness, self-confidence, self-esteem, self-concept, motivation and independence; and
Become empowered to advocate for themselves and others.
Many of these skills can be transferred to the employment realm, further helping to build self-sufficiency.
But we know that it needs to be true sport – sport that is founded on positive values of fun, fairness, inclusion and excellence.
Contributing to quality of life in communities
Sport’s benefits are not limited to individuals. Sport can also help to strengthen communities by building social capital and fostering greater inclusion of marginalized or excluded groups.
This view is supported by 72 percent of Canadians who believe that sport is a key contributor to quality of life in their communities.
When asked to indicate specific ways in which sport contributes to their quality of life, over 85 percent of Canadians surveyed by the Conference Board of Canada pointed to sport’s ability to:
Provide a place for people to meet and interact;
Encourage people from different backgrounds to work and play together;
Provide community volunteer opportunities;
Teach people responsibility and respect for other people and property;
Get people of all ages actively involved in their communities;
Give people a sense of purpose;
Provide families with opportunities to know each other better; and
Help prevent youth crime.
Building social capital
Sport can help bring individuals and communities together, create a sense of community, encourage active citizenship, and foster trust, reciprocity, and a sense of security among community members. Together, these elements are the social capital of every community.
Places with more social capital are generally safer, better governed and more prosperous than those with less, and people with more social capital are more likely to be happier, healthier, safer and employed than those with less.
International research has shown that a nation’s level of sport participation is closely linked to its levels of social trust and wellbeing. People who participate in sport are more likely to vote, contact a politician and sign a petition than the average citizen. They also show higher levels of social trust, trust in institutions, and life satisfaction and are more likely to express the view that immigration enriches the cultural life of the nation.
Research from Australia indicates that residents of small rural communities feel sport can also help to keep their communities together, promoting community trust, cohesion, pride and loyalty. In some cases, sport clubs are the last remaining social infrastructure in declining rural towns.
Because sport can help individuals to both enhance their capacities and participate in broader social networks, it offers an important way to build more inclusive communities. This has important implications for many groups in Canadian society who are currently not full participants in Canada’s social, economic and cultural life.
If you like to know more about our development plans or to share your ideas with us, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at: info@familynatureparcs.com. You may also consider to Register for FREE to receive our periodical progress reports and news.
Darya Eugenie Farha – March 24, 1965 – November 16, 2011
It was Darya Eugenie Farha, to whom the Ashton Family Nature Parc will be officially dedicated, who inspired her father Fred L Farha, founder and Chairman of Family Nature Parcs, to abandon his advanced plans to develop an upper scale 18 hole golf course and exclusive clubhouse facilities on his 138.4 acres located at Ashton in the city of Ottawa, Ontario Canada.
Darya reminded her dad of the outdoor Nature Parc he visited often in Sweden, which he used to describe to her as ‘an outdoor paradise of nature, sport, recreation and wellness’.
Later, it was Darya who asked her father to include, in the development plans of the first Family Nature Parcs taking place at Ashton, a large tent for 300 persons and to place the tent in a prominent place in the Parc and to call it “The Nation’s Tent”.
That was Darya’s legacy of devotion to her beloved multicultural Canada. A tent a place where all Canadians of their beautiful ethnical diversity, especially the children, come to meet other Canadians, to socialize, to witness and experience their each other true culture, language, dress, music and to bond, in the tent of one great multicultural country, Canada, as one cohesive and equal citizens.
We think it is befitting to address the business model and mission of Family Nature Parcs in relation to the present state, practice and facilities of Canadian community sports. The needed improvements in all spheres related to Canadian community sport are outlined in the well researched Backgrounders to What Sport Can Do study published by True Sport Canada. The report dealt at length with the present lack of inclusion of aboriginal and new Canadian families in community sport and recreation and the prevailing feeling of dispossession aboriginal and new Canadians feel about community sport and their almost total withdrawal from community sport and recreation.
We are pleased to share with you, few valuable selections from this authoritative report:
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT BUILDING STRONGER, MORE INCLUSIVE AND VIBRANT COMMUNITIES
Renewing Aboriginal culture
Higher rates of illness, premature mortality, school leaving, unemployment, poverty, and incarceration among Canada’s Aboriginal population reflect the significant disparities between the social, economic and cultural opportunities available to Aboriginal Canadians and those available to Canadians on the whole.
Sport has been identified by Aboriginal people and by Canada’s federal and provincial/territorial governments as an important means of helping to reduce these disparities, particularly as they affect Aboriginal youth, the fastest growing segment of Canada’s population.
There is growing evidence that cultural continuity is critical to restoring the social, economic and spiritual health of Aboriginal communities. As an important cultural feature, true sport has a role to play in this process.
Sport and games centred on traditional skills and culturally based principles have always played an important role in North American Aboriginal culture. This is reflected today in the popularity and success of sport and cultural events such as the Arctic Winter Games, the North American Indigenous Games, and the World Indigenous Nations Games.
Research from Australia confirms that sport offers particular benefits with regard to Aboriginal communities in terms of building cultural pride, social cohesion, self-esteem, and transferable skills among participants and volunteers.
Sport carnivals can also help reduce drug and alcohol use on a short-term basis, with related reductions in family violence.
Sport and recreation programs offered with other supports have also helped to increase school attendance and achievement levels, and reduce the incidence of youth crime and suicide.
Once again we know that it must be sport founded on the positive values of fun, fairness, inclusion and excellence – true sport has the power to help.
Helping newcomers to integrate more quickly into Canadian society
There is strong evidence that newcomers to Canada are experiencing greater difficulty integrating into their new communities and the Canadian labour market than their predecessors of 20 years ago.
UK research on sport and the inclusion of refugees and asylum seekers shows that sport can help to break down barriers between newcomers and local host populations, improve relationships among asylum seekers of diverse ethnic backgrounds, and build their self-esteem and self-confidence.
Sport is also being used successfully to link newcomers to key community services and supports such as health centres, recreation programs, ESL courses, childcare, and local universities.
The Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants has identified sport and recreation as important tools for the integration of immigrant youth and developed an inclusive recreational model for immigrant and refugee youth to serve as the basis for partnerships between sport and recreation organizations and immigrant serving agencies.
Fostering greater inclusion of people with disabilities
People with disabilities face many forms of social, economic and political exclusion. Even in the absence of negative stereotypes and discriminatory attitudes, people without disabilities may underestimate the capacities of people with disabilities and feel unsure about how to accommodate and include them in day-to-day activities.
True Sport helps to remove these barriers by changing community perceptions of people with disabilities, focusing attention on their abilities rather than their disability.
Sport also changes the player with a disability. As a result of exclusion, people with disabilities may have fewer opportunities to acquire important social skills and to fully develop their physical and mental potential. Through sport, they can:
Access opportunities for positive social interaction with peers with and without disabilities, make friends, and build social networks vital to their health and wellbeing;
Learn vital social interaction skills such as communication, cooperation, teamwork, the importance of rules, goal setting, and self-discipline;
Become physically stronger with improved stamina, coordination, flexibility, posture, muscle tone, balance, strength, and movement;
Enhance their social-emotional development and capacity for self-help, acquiring greater emotional control, social awareness, self-confidence, self-esteem, self-concept, motivation and independence; and
Become empowered to advocate for themselves and others.
Many of these skills can be transferred to the employment realm, further helping to build self-sufficiency.
But we know that it needs to be true sport – sport that is founded on positive values of fun, fairness, inclusion and excellence.
Contributing to quality of life in communities
Sport’s benefits are not limited to individuals. Sport can also help to strengthen communities by building social capital and fostering greater inclusion of marginalized or excluded groups.
This view is supported by 72 percent of Canadians who believe that sport is a key contributor to quality of life in their communities.
When asked to indicate specific ways in which sport contributes to their quality of life, over 85 percent of Canadians surveyed by the Conference Board of Canada pointed to sport’s ability to:
Provide a place for people to meet and interact;
Encourage people from different backgrounds to work and play together;
Provide community volunteer opportunities;
Teach people responsibility and respect for other people and property;
Get people of all ages actively involved in their communities;
Give people a sense of purpose;
Provide families with opportunities to know each other better; and
Help prevent youth crime.
Building social capital
Sport can help bring individuals and communities together, create a sense of community, encourage active citizenship, and foster trust, reciprocity, and a sense of security among community members. Together, these elements are the social capital of every community.
Places with more social capital are generally safer, better governed and more prosperous than those with less, and people with more social capital are more likely to be happier, healthier, safer and employed than those with less.
International research has shown that a nation’s level of sport participation is closely linked to its levels of social trust and wellbeing. People who participate in sport are more likely to vote, contact a politician and sign a petition than the average citizen. They also show higher levels of social trust, trust in institutions, and life satisfaction and are more likely to express the view that immigration enriches the cultural life of the nation.
Research from Australia indicates that residents of small rural communities feel sport can also help to keep their communities together, promoting community trust, cohesion, pride and loyalty. In some cases, sport clubs are the last remaining social infrastructure in declining rural towns.
Because sport can help individuals to both enhance their capacities and participate in broader social networks, it offers an important way to build more inclusive communities. This has important implications for many groups in Canadian society who are currently not full participants in Canada’s social, economic and cultural life.
If you like to know more about our development plans or to share your ideas with us, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at: info@familynatureparcs.com. You may also consider to Register for FREE to receive our periodical progress reports and news.
