From finding bone-shaped stress balls on the shelves, to hand-cutting flowers for the walls, Recreation Society is making a storage room their home.
Recreation therapy is a way to relax with simple tasks and social activities.
Recreation Society is a club connected to Long Beach State’s Recreational Therapy department. The club promotes these methods on campus and in the Long Beach area. It is supervised by assistant professor of recreation and leisure studies, Chungsup Lee. Club members meet on Tuesday in Room 010 of the Social Science Public Administration Building.
The club started the semester off at Week of Welcome with candy giveaways and a duck ring toss.
Recreational Society uses various technologies and methods to aid people with their mental health.
Club membership is open to students of all majors and its activities include community service outside of campus.
The Recreational Therapy Department, “Essentially is using any leisure activity that you like to do outside of work, it could be going out run right, going out to do any activity or like going hands-on on a craft or honestly even music and art,” said club President Briana Gonzalez.
Gonzalez said that recreational therapy can benefit people who have a disability or mental illness.
“We’re using those kinds of activities to adjust them to their circumstance,” Gonzalez said.
Club Treasurer Christine Pineda said the Recreation Society recently worked with retired military and other seniors using virtual reality to facilitate physical activity.
“We’ve been going to American Goldstar Manor, it’s in West Long Beach, and we offer VR to the residents,” Pineda said.
Recreational therapy involves a range of activities that people can do to improve their mental health.
“We promote activities and facilitate activities for those, maybe like in an elderly setting or like a community and we use those activities as I just said, it could be pottery, or like dance, or like tap dance. They really love karaoke,” Gonzalez said.
Pineda said the club advisor is trying to incorporate VR for use on campus.
This year, the club has plans to turn the storage room they use for meetings into a hub for study and relaxation.
“The idea is that we can fundraise enough money to gather like supplies that we might need for the room just so that we can have like a place where we just like come back to,” Gonzalez said.
Recreation Society plans to emphasize mental health on campus through social activities and the space that the officers have been converting into a resource and study area.
Gonzalez said recreational therapy can also be effective for stress relief.
“Anybody who you know needs that time to destress, it totally applies to them as well, like it could be, it doesn’t necessarily have to focus on those who have like mental health issues or the disability,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez stated that the field of recreational therapy has enabled the group to work with various communities from children to the elderly
“We work on the whole spectrum, basically.”