Our Shared Destiny

Park Rapids lakes area will be a vibrant community with opportunity for all. We will embrace an exceptional quality of life and a growing economy, while protecting our natural environment and small town beauty and charm. Park Rapids will be known as a community that is a great place to live, work and play:

- acknowledging our differences;

- respecting each other’s talents;

- valuing shared prosperity; and

- working together for the broader community good.

Park Rapids: A Status Report

The Park Rapids community is blessed with many assets – we’re located in a beautiful natural setting, we have fine leadership, and we have a full range of services and facilities that are the envy of communities of much larger size.

But we also know that we’re not perfect. As the following pages show, we have challenges just like other communities. Our economic life is not as good as we’d like it, some of our youth have more than their fair share of challenges, and our population is not as healthy as it should be.

But here’s the good news: we’ve got everything we need to create the future we want! The key to our future success is going to be the ability of the community to work together, not only to meet our challenges, but also to take advantages of our opportunities. As the rest of this report will show, we’ve got plenty!

About This Site

The purpose of this report is to assess the present status of the Park Rapids community and to focus community members on future challenges and opportunities. (“Park Rapids community” includes much more than the city limits; it also includes the rural area served by the city.) In essence this report asks “What are the challenges Park Rapids faces, and how do we utilize our assets to overcome them?”

To tackle this question a task force out of Progress Park Rapids, with funding from the Northwest Minnesota Foundation, the Hewitt Family Fund, the Headwaters Regional Development Commission and the Park Rapids Enterprise, worked on compiling data from a number of statewide and nationwide entities (click here to view all data sources for this report).

As you read through the report you will sometimes notice data for five other communities or counties. These communities (Detroit Lakes, Bemidji, Brainerd, Alexandria and Grand Rapids) were chosen to help measure Park Rapids against other lake and pine areas similar to ours.

Five broad areas were selected for analysis: People and Talent, Economics and Prosperity, Community Wellness and Safety, Livability, and Social Capital/Community Readiness. Why these? Because the best way to predict the future is to create it, and these are the areas we have to nail if we’re going to create our successful future.

But just understanding where we’re at is not enough. Progress Park Rapids would like to challenge you to get involved. Each section of this report includes recommendations for future action. And, each ends with one or more suggestions about how you can get involved.

As one community leader told us once, “Living in Park Rapids is not a spectator sport.” Let’s find a way to make this community even more special than it already is.

People and Talent
Analyzes our talent and workforce based off of labor force projections and graduation rates.
Economics and Prosperity
Looks at the economic climate for our area through key measures of poverty rate, median household income and county income distributions.
Community Wellness and Safety
Obesity rates, overweight rates, youth binge drinking, youth smoking heavily are health statistics chosen for this section. Adult and juvenile crimes rates are included as well.
Livability
Measured in this report using maps that show regional recreational assets, frequency of artists living in our area, and parks in the city.
Social Capital and Community Readiness
Utilizing methodology identified by the University of Minnesota, this section measures our social capital by addressing where our strongest and weakest communication networks are.
How to get involved
Source and Links

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the members of the Indicator Report Team out of Progress Park Rapids for their commitment to this report and their continual commitment to the future of Park Rapids. A sincere thank you is extended to Nancy Carol, Tina Eischens, Kathy Grell, Ken Grob, and Irene Weis.

Special thanks are also extended to the Park Rapids League of Women Voters and Lu Ann Hurd-Lof for pursuing a partnership between the League and Progress Park Rapids and helping make the indicator report a centerpiece community issue.

In addition, we would like to thank the entities that came together for the collaborative funding of this project: The Northwest Minnesota Foundation, The Hewitt Family Fund, The Park Rapids Enterprise, and the Headwaters Regional Development Commission’s Successful Communities Challenge Fund.

The following Headwaters Regional Development Commission staff members contributed to the completion of this report:

Cliff Tweedale
Millisa Smith