Please Take the AW River Stewardship Survey

[wu_wei]

Hi Everyone,

I have been working with an awesome group of volunteers and agency river managers to develop a survey designed to dive into the minds of our little subculture. As I see it, 90% of river access problems are caused by a lack of understanding of who paddlers are, why we paddle, and how we like/need to be managed. We want to treat this cause (misunderstanding)- rather than constantly treating the symptoms. In addition, here at AW we want to do the best job or representing paddlers - and it helps to have some data to support/confirm what we are saying. The paddling community is bigger and more diverse than ever, and we want to know who the heck we are, and how we are changing over time. The end result will hopefully be more rivers protected, and really great river management by our agency partners.
We are going to share the results of this survey with river managers and post selected results on our website. Please take this survey seriously, please be honest, and most importantly, Please take the survey!

It'll take you about 15 minutes. Check it out at:

http://www.americanwhitewater.org/archive/article/1436/

Thanks!

Kevin Colburn

[Alek]

I took the survey and I would like to leave some feedback.

First, there are many questions about AW, which I don't know much about. So I answered about my habits as a kayaker, but I skipped the ones about AW's website or magazine.

Second, I think some of the questions (like #17) are ambiguos and take
too much time, so maybe people will be deterred from completing the survey. I think it would be great to have statistics about how often people kayak solo or what safety equipment they bring, but 9 questions about whether "I feel that I can be myself on the river" are a bit much.

And finally a question: will the results of the survey be made public? Where and when?