This guide is designed as a living resource for aquatic programs and other organizations to create or refine their community- and culturally-responsive programming practices. Within the guide, you will find achievable practices and information to create more intentional programming.
This guide is intended for any organization, program, or entity developing or partnering to create aquatic programming. The guide’s sections include the following components:
This website is structured to help you easily navigate through the guide, using two menus located on the left and right of your screen. If you are using a mobile device, you will see two purple boxes anchored in the middle of the screen. You can access the menus by pressing the left or right box. As you scroll down the page, the boxes/menus will scroll with you.
If you have any issues or questions accessing the Aquatic Guide, please email hiprccom@uw.edu for assistance.
Please use this form to share your ideas and comments for this guide >> bit.ly/AquaticProgramingGuide
Across the world and in the U.S., water safety is a public health priority. In the U.S., there are an estimated average of 11 drowning deaths and 22 non-fatal drownings each day (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention – CDC). Issues such as systemic racism and lack of access to inclusive facilities to develop swimming skills and water competency play a significant role in the disproportionate rates of drownings in the United States. This includes social determinants, attitudes and behaviors, and knowledge gaps in drowning prevention that influence belief systems towards water-based activities within populations at high risk of drowning.
A 2017 study conducted by the USA Swimming Foundation found that 65% of Black/ African Americans and 45% of Latinx Americans have little to no swimming skills (Aquatics International), and 66% percent of Asian American adults and youth do not know how to swim (Dat Winning). Black/African American youth as well as Alaska Native and American Indian youth have higher drowning deaths compared to white youth (Journal of Safety Research). For example, Black/African-American children ages 10-14 years are 7.6 times more likely to drown than white children in swimming pools (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention – CDC). Overall, almost 40 million adults (15.4%) in the United States do not know how to swim and over half (54.7%) have never taken a swimming lesson (CDC). It is essential that aquatic facilities provide culturally- and community-responsive aquatic programming to prevent future drownings and increase water competency skills in their communities.
The University of Washington’s Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center (UW HIPRC), Public Health – Seattle & King County, Seattle Children’s, and SPLASHForward formed a Drowning Prevention Collaborative that has been working since 2022 to increase water safety in Seattle and King County. In November 2022, our Collaborative developed and hosted a free, virtual Student Lifeguard Workshop in support of Injury Free Coalition for Kids 2022 National Injury Prevention Day (NIPD). As part of this effort, the Collaborative met with and learned from aquatic programs and managers as well as public health professionals locally, nationally, and internationally. Aquatic managers shared many effective approaches to working with diverse communities and supported the need for more culturally appropriate programming and for sharing best practices across aquatic facilities.
This guide shares learnings from aquatic programs and health professionals, featuring best practices and information to offer community-engaged and culturally responsive aquatic programming to support drowning prevention efforts within diverse communities.
An essential start to community- and culturally-responsive aquatic programming is getting to know your community. Consider these questions:
Within this section, you will find information on how to better understand your communities’ needs and how to work in collaboration with organizations in your service area.
Community organizations have often built the trust of community members and can be a vital resource for understanding the cultures, religions, and histories of the communities in your facility’s service area. These organizations can be eager to advise, advertise, and participate in building culturally and community-responsive aquatic programming. Your facility may already have engaged with community organizations. It is a good idea to meet with your community partners each year to respond to changes in the organizations and their programming. You can find these organizations using a referral search method, asking a community organization known to you for other organizations.
Below are examples of the community organizations that have partnered with aquatic facilities and programs:
Much of the aquatic facility programming will be directed toward school-aged children, and schools can bring children into aquatic programs at your facility. Elementary schools can partner in providing swim lessons or classroom information sessions as part of their curricula. This includes working with Parent Teacher Student Associations, School Foundations, or similar organizations to provide swim instruction during classroom time as part of physical education curriculum. Middle and high schools may have swim clubs and swim teams, and can partner in recruiting students to junior lifeguard programs, swim instructor training, and lifeguard certification.
In addition, schools will often have systems in place to identify historically underserved populations (e.g., those qualifying for free and reduced price meals, those whose primary language at home is not English) and those with special needs. Conversations with schools, school districts, and community organizations can identify additional opportunities to support water safety and learning for students of all abilities.
Many non-profit organizations (e.g., Boys and Girls Clubs, YMCA, specific cultural organizations) provide services to underrepresented, special needs, and elderly populations. These organizations can facilitate conversations to better understand who the underserved members of the community are and what you as a facility can do to better reach them through responsive programming.
Programming that other aquatic facilities, including swim schools, have implemented to address community priorities, concerns, and needs can provide a shortcut to improving your own programs and be a resource for your aquatic facility. This guide aims to share the practices and programming that we’ve learned about through conversations with aquatic facilities and organizations. However, those within your area may already know your community or be willing to collaborate or share with you.
Aquatic programs have collaborated with primary care clinics, low-income housing, and faith-based organizations on promoting water safety and swim lessons.
The V3 Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota collaborates with groups (schools, churches, after school programs, nonprofits) and conducts surveys as a way of learning about community beliefs around water as a basis for where to begin with programs.
Seattle Parks and Recreation in Seattle, Washington has formed a partnership with Seattle Public Schools so that high school students can fulfill their community service requirements as swim lesson assistants. This has led to recruitment of some of these students to swim instructor and lifeguard positions.
Rainier Beach Pool in Seattle, Washington partners with their teen program on a Friday night swim program that offers swim skills development. This has been a terrific source of lifeguards for their pool.
The Kent YMCA in King County, Washington has partnered with non-profit community organizations like Mother Africa that supports African refugee and immigrant women and their families to offer swim lessons and water safety classes.
The Evergreen Community Aquatic Center serving White Center of Seattle, Burien and West Seattle in Washington has partnered with many different types of community organizations, including the local Community Development Association (CDA), Parks and Recreation, churches, after school programs, summer programs, and community centers to identify and engage with youth who might need assistance getting into swim lessons.
Surveying your community directly at regular intervals can help ensure that you reach and receive input from all the different segments of your community, and that you are aware of ongoing priorities in your community. However, launching a community-wide survey can be a significant undertaking. Collaborating with an organization (e.g., Parks and Recreation) that already conducts community surveys is one way to decrease the workload.
Here are survey examples and a resource on conducting surveys:
While direct interactions with your community provide the most up-to-date information on how your community is evolving, city, county, and census data can allow you to understand how your community is represented in numbers. Cities, counties, and their health departments often gather and report data (e.g., demographics, drowning rates), sometimes by smaller geographic areas. The census data provide information on different community factors such as socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity. These data sources may represent data from a few years prior due to lags in data availability. Understanding these community factors can help you understand if those using your facility and/or programming are representative of your community.
There are many reasons to collaborate with other aquatic facilities and resources in the community – learning from their successes, avoiding duplication when appropriate, and joining together to advocate for important initiatives. For example, access to swimming pools and aquatic facilities is an important factor in providing essential aquatic programs within communities, especially diverse communities. These facilities provide safe places to cool off in the summer, and to learn safe water recreation year-round. Advocacy for new swimming pools, aquatic facilities, lifeguards, swim instructors, and programs are all essential and will contribute to increasing the availability and access of culturally responsive aquatic programs.
The Fife Aquatic Center in Pierce County, Washington reported adding questions related to aquatic programming to the Parks Recreation and Open Space Survey that is launched in their community every six years.
In this section, you can learn how to increase community members’ access to your aquatic facility and make sure all community members feel welcome. As you get to know your community, you will learn what gets in the way of community members using your aquatic facility or participating in your programs. These barriers can be physical, structural, mental, or emotional in nature. Being responsive to your community means understanding and addressing these barriers, which can be done in partnership with your community members themselves or a local organization that works directly with them.
Some of the common barriers that aquatic facilities shared are cost, fear of water, scheduling, and transportation to the pool. Additional barriers are addressed below:
Many/some community members experience more than one barrier. Addressing a combination of barriers (e.g., cost and transportation) may be needed to increase access.
To address the cost of aquatic programming, many aquatic facilities and their partners have scholarship programs. Making sure these scholarship programs prioritize the local community and are easy to use will increase their success. The Everyone Swims program found that increasing visibility of scholarship programs increased swim lesson registration substantially. Strategies for improving access to scholarships could include:
More and more aquatic centers and associations recognize that offering swim lessons alone will not reach community members who experience a fear of water. These individuals may need opportunities to become familiar with water and water safety strategies first. This can take place in water awareness or water familiarization classes on dry land that precede swim lessons, or in opportunities to visit a pool and learn more about its offerings without committing to swim lessons. Applying learnings about the cultural, religious, and/or historical barriers that may have contributed to fear of water among the communities you serve can help you design these offerings. Example organizations that offer these programs include:
National Annual Pools Day events are designed to bring new families to aquatic facilities and introduce them to water safety. For guidance on setting up a water safety event, see Seattle Children’s: (Swimming and Water Safety Programs – Water Facility Water Safety Promotion Events).
The Covington Pool in Covington, Washington has a scholarship program that will accept many different types of needs documents to decrease financial barriers – free/reduced lunch, foster care, parent income.
SwimRVA in Richmond, Virginia has a scholarship program that provides swim lessons at no cost to second graders, free passes for all who qualify, and free health & wellness assessment for seniors. Their second grade ‘Learn to Swim’ program provides transportation and a seven day lesson program serving over 25 elementary schools across six school districts. They partner with Richmond’s YMCA and Nova Swimming to serve even more elementary schools.
Rainier Beach Pool in Seattle, Washington works with local community partners to offer free family swims for the community to become more familiar with the pool and its water safety and swim lesson programs.
No More Under in Seattle, Washington is a nonprofit dedicated to equitable swim access and tools. They have built a free, five-day ‘Introduction to Aquatics Programs’ to bring new and diverse families into the aquatic world. Their program helps families find joy in aquatics and supports them with resources to sign up for more swim lessons through scholarships offered at pools.
Seattle Parks and Recreation and Oshun Swim School in Seattle, Washington are partnering to offer trauma-informed and Afro-Indigenous centered swim opportunities, including open swims and educational workshops, to the Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) + Allies community.
Most aquatic facilities have posters, brochures, and pictures that illustrate their programs. It is essential that the offerings are responsive to the diverse communities that your facility serves (e.g., gender-specific swims, intergenerational swim instruction), and that the pictures included in these materials represent the community you serve. These community members might include individuals from different races and ethnicities, individuals wearing a burkini (modest swimsuit), and/or individuals who use wheelchairs.
Having messaging about your aquatic program available in languages other than English is important for increasing knowledge about your facility. Understanding which languages are spoken by community members using your facility is important to focus your translation efforts. Consider coordinating with community organizations to find translation and interpretation resources.
Staff provide the face of your aquatic center to the community. Conducting regular staff trainings to ensure that staff are aware of who comprises your center’s community and understand how to welcome and provide culturally aware customer service and communication when working with diverse communities and community members.
Creating spaces in your facility for community members to gather can be another way to welcome diverse community members and individuals who do not swim. If you create these spaces, make sure they are accessible to individuals who may have physical disabilities (e.g., elders, individuals in wheelchairs).
The Wenatchee Pool in eastern Washington, where there is a large Spanish-speaking population, offers their materials in Spanish and English.
The Rainier Beach Pool in Seattle, Washington makes sure their materials reflect the community they serve. They show images of swimmers wearing different types of swim wear, including burkinis.
The V3 Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota offers a Swim to Earn (S2E) program with a culturally relevant and responsive training approach. Through S2E, participants are empowered to explore a world of opportunities in aquatics, in pursuit of individual success and a more inclusive aquatic community.
The Kent YMCA in King County, Washington has resources beyond the aquatic center, including a community room for meetings and parties, Wi-Fi access, food distribution, and other human services. They are able to reach the communities who come to the YMCA for other reasons and offer their aquatic programs to them.
Swim lessons are often the main draw for aquatic centers, and much of their pool time is dedicated to offering swim lessons, primarily for youth. With this high demand, there are limited openings in swim lessons. This means that families with substantial resources might travel from outside a facility’s immediate service area to access swim lessons. Some aquatic facilities have reported that on-line swim lesson registration can result in all openings being taken within minutes! Families with greater access to using on-line platforms may inadvertently receive priority with on-line registration, excluding populations without on-line access and familiarity.
Restructuring your registration process to ensure access to swim lessons for the local community, and to make the registration process more equitable, might include:
1) Prioritizing local community members and scholarship recipients by allowing them to register first
2) Allowing for both in-person and on-line registration
3) Providing opportunities for pre-registration for populations that have been historically excluded from aquatic facilities and swim lessons, and populations that may need additional time or assistance to register. Many of these populations have higher rates of drowning, and swim lessons are particularly important for them.
Local community organizations are excellent partners in creating swim lesson opportunities for groups that otherwise may not have access to lessons. Working together could lead to programs and opportunities that would have impact and create opportunities appropriate for various age groups from youth to elders.
Research has shown that youth swim competence is associated with the degree to which their parents are comfortable swimming. A child is less likely to learn to swim if their parent does not know how to swim or has fear and anxiety around water (Journal of Pediatrics, 2022). Offering water safety and swim instruction to families in addition to youth could involve:
1) Offering informal opportunities for families to come to the aquatic center, get to know the facility and staff, and learn about offerings for them.
2) Making sure that there are intergenerational swim lesson offerings so that parents, grandparents, caregivers, and children can learn to swim.
3) Reviewing swim lesson curricula to make sure that the skills prioritize water safety and water competency skills rather than focusing on refinement of stroke form.
The Covington Pool in Covington, Washington offers in-person as well as on-line registration, and prioritizes registration for community residents by offering them registration 24 hours before non-residents. There is also a different fee structure for non-residents. Covington Pool also has a scholarship program that will accept many different types of needs documents to decrease financial barriers – free/reduced lunch, foster care, parent income.
The Wenatchee Pool in eastern Washington State allows scholarship recipients to register before others to make sure they secure swim lessons.
The Rainier Beach Pool in Seattle, Washington allows scholarship and low-income groups to register one week before open registration.
Seattle Parks and Recreation in Seattle, Washington provides assistance to families in navigating the scholarship process. This involves hosting scholarship information and application events to review applications and help families identify necessary documents.
The Boys and Girls Clubs of Bellevue, Washington; local nonprofit SPLASHForward; and local community pool Samena Swim & Recreation Club partnered to provide an eight-week after school swim lesson program for elementary students on free and reduced lunch programs in the Bellevue School District.
The Snohomish Aquatic Center in Snohomish County, Washington collaborates with Swim for Life, which provides one session of free swim lessons to all second-graders in the Snohomish School District at the Snohomish Aquatic Center.
No More Under in Seattle, Washington is a nonprofit dedicated to equitable swim access and tools. They have built a free, five-day ‘Introduction to Aquatics Programs’ to bring new and diverse families into the aquatic world. Their program helps families find joy in aquatics and supports them with resources to sign up for more swim lessons through scholarships offered at pools.
Rainier Beach Pool in Seattle, Washington works with local community partners to offer free family swims for the community to become more familiar with the pool and its water safety and swim lesson programs.
Seattle Parks and Recreation and Oshun Swim School in Seattle, Washington are partnering to offer trauma-informed and Afro-Indigenous centered swim opportunities, including open swims and educational workshops, to the Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) + Allies community.
Staffing is the backbone of all programming efforts. Within aquatic facilities and organizations, maintaining knowledgeable and specialized staff is critical for delivering successful aquatic programs. Finding staff members who represent the community might involve holding workshops to share information about aquatic staff roles and the skills required, as well as proactive recruitment from:
The Rainier Beach Pool in Seattle, Washington links with its community-based Teen Programs to offer free swims on Friday and Saturday nights. Some of their staff have come from this community-based partnership, which means they are able to hire staff members who represent the community and speak the languages of the community that the Aquatic Center serves.
The Mountlake Terrace Pool in Snohomish County, Washington attends an April job fair each year, sponsored by a local school district (Edmonds School District), to identify students from the community who may want to teach swimming and gain work experience. These new staff are eventually invited to become certified lifeguards at an on-site course.
The Evergreen Community Aquatic Program in the White Center area of Seattle, Washington recruits most of its staff from the local high school. It encourages any student with the interest in working at the pool to apply for work and will train individuals into a position with their pool, including those with little to no swimming skills.
The Drowning Prevention Collaborative: Public Health – Seattle & King County, Seattle Children’s, SPLASHForward, and UW Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center, have held virtual Student Lifeguard Workshops for high school students in King County to share what it’s like and what it takes to become a lifeguard. The workshop includes a panel of local aquatic managers and lifeguard instructors and student lifeguards who share their lived experiences. The Collaborative, in partnership with SPLASHForward’s High School Lifeguard Training Program, have partnered with local aquatic facilities and high schools to support skills assessment and lifeguard training for cohorts of diverse students.
Some community populations may need specific programming, responding to factors such as culture, religion, physical needs, or age. This section highlights the types of special programming that some aquatic facilities have put into place to welcome diverse community groups.
Certain religious and cultural groups require more coverage than a standard swimsuit can offer. Addressing this need requires collaboration between aquatic facilities and members of these groups to foster understanding of what is appropriate to wear in the pool. A mutual understanding of the needs of both groups sets the foundation for meeting this specific need. To welcome culturally appropriate, greater coverage swimsuits (e.g., burkinis), consider keeping or selling these suits at the facility. Consider providing a resource list that is easily found with your program literature or at the front desk if your facility does not sell merchandise.
Certain religious and cultural groups have requirements regarding who can see them in certain attire and who can be in the pool facility at the same time. Providing gender-specific swims with gender concordant lifeguards and staff is one way to address these needs. In order to provide gender-specific swims, facility and community members would best come together to discuss these requirements and talk about the aquatic facility’s capacity to provide such programming in a culturally responsive way. Discussions might include whether it is necessary to have same-gender lifeguards, and whether it is necessary to cover any windows looking in at the pool.
The chemicals used in chlorinated pools and the salt in saltwater pools can both be damaging to natural hair. Concerns about this damage can be a major barrier for community members with these hair care needs. Having knowledge of a proper hair care routine before and after using the pool is essential to minimizing damage to a swimmer’s hair and to increase comfort in swimming in both chlorinated and saltwater pools.
Aquatic facilities that offer adaptive programs for individuals with special/specific needs often do this through a third-party program provider such as an adaptive swim lesson provider, aquatic physical therapist, aquatic occupational therapist, or medical wellness provider. Consider whether you want to hire professionally trained staff or to partner with existing program providers to offer these adaptive programs.
Consider program availability that takes into account factors such as time of day, pool accessibility, and social opportunities pre- or post-swim activities. Speaking to your community’s elders with words such as ‘active aging’ as you share programs designed for them can promote greater receptivity and success. Reaching out to elders for input can be a great opportunity to adapt the programs you currently provide.
No More Under in Seattle, Washington, a nonprofit dedicated to equitable swim access and tools, makes sure individuals participating in their programs are supported with appropriate swim caps, goggles, and even the costs of transportation. They offer swim lesson options at various times to ensure families can select options that don’t conflict with work, religious, or other schedules.
The Wenatchee Pool in eastern Washington State coordinates a Special Olympics Swim Team, and partners with the Eastmont Metro Parks Aquatic Facility, where the team practices.
The City of Spokane’s Aquatics Program in eastern Washington State has been developing relationships with community advocates to provide swimming opportunities for the visually impaired community. This effort will create a sense of warm welcome to the visually impaired community by including them in routine programming and offering training for the aquatics staff in working with the visually impaired community.
The Mountlake Terrace Pool in Snohomish County, Washington has had a strong adaptive swimming program where staff were trained to teach adaptive swim lessons. Its pool has a wheelchair ramp to facilitate entry.
The Snohomish Aquatic Center in Snohomish County, Washington offers adaptive private lessons for youth with special needs during the pool’s quiet times of the day. This includes youth with autism spectrum disorder, as well as those using wheelchairs for mobility.
Nurturing Water Therapies in Bellevue, Washington provides adaptive swim lessons serving people of all ages with sensory, developmental, neurological, physical or other health challenges and disabilities. They serve over 200 people in their community with their adaptive swim curriculum that teaches essential water safety skills.
The Covington Pool in King County, Washington stretches its aquatics program to include social programs for elders that bring them to the pool. They hold a social activity that includes gathering outside the water every one to two months (e.g., seed planting in pots they can take home).
Program evaluation is essential for aquatic program success and is a place of growth for many aquatic programs. Some programs track scholarship participation numbers as one metric of success. Many programs have drop boxes for program suggestions on site. Many evaluate their swim lesson programs. Some use their email distribution lists both to communicate with their users and to ask for input and feedback.
We hope to provide more examples on measuring success as this guide evolves. Please contact us here with your evaluation strategies and other ways that you measure your program successes.
In this section, we include resources mentioned throughout the guide and offer additional resources that may be helpful to your program. Please submit resources that fit these sections here (via survey). Resources are organized in the same structure as the guide itself.
Examples of community aquatic surveys:
Please use this form to share your ideas and comments >>
This guide was funded in part by a gift from Seattle Children’s to the University of Washington Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center. Contributors from the Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center (Laura-Mae Baldwin, M. Angele Theard, Monica S. Vavilala) SPLASHForward (Susan Pappalardo), Seattle Children’s (Isabell Sakamoto), and the University of Washington School of Public Health (Emily Vega) held the conversations with aquatic managers and aquatic organizations. Contributions from Public Health – Seattle & King County (Tony Gomez, Gurman Kaur, Christina Riley), Seattle Children’s (Isabell Sakamoto), SPLASHForward (Susan Pappalardo), the University of Washington School of Public Health (Emily Vega), and the UW Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center (Laura-Mae Baldwin, Christen Bourgeois, Alexandra de Leon, Linda Quan, M. Angele Theard, Karishama Vahora, Monica S. Vavilala), have supported the creation of this guide.
Would you like to get involved or share your successes? Please use this form to do so >>
We acknowledge and appreciate the many local, national, and international aquatic programs and organizations that took the time to speak with us and share their successes (in alphabetical order):
City of Spokane Aquatics Program: www.my.spokanecity.org
Covington Aquatic Center: www.covingtonwa.gov
Drowning Prevention Coalition of Arizona: www.preventdrownings.org
Evergreen Aquatic Center: www.evergreenpools.org
Fife Aquatic Center: www.cityoffife.org
Kent YMCA: www.seattleymca.org
Mountlake Terrace Pool: www.cityofmlt.com
No More Under: www.nomoreunder.org
Rainier Beach Pool: www.seattle.gov/parks
Seattle Parks and Recreation: www.seattle.gov/parks
Snohomish Aquatic Center: www.sno.wednet.edu
SPLASHForward: www.splashforward.org
SwimRVA: www.swimrichmond.org
The Black Swimming Association: www.thebsa.co.uk
The V3 Center: www.v3sports.org
Washington Recreation & Park Association: www.wrpatoday.org
Wenatchee City Pool: www.wenatcheewa.gov