(Photo | Courtesy of Oregon State Marine Board)
The Willamette Valley Visitors Association (WVVA) has partnered with the Oregon State Marine Board (OSMB) in an effort to increase communication and community engagement around safe life jacket practices among children and adults participating in all forms of water recreation. The organizations are working together to gather life jacket safety commitments from other organizations around Oregon.
The OSMB and WVVA are proud to announce the partners who will commit to showing imagery and graphics of people of all ages wearing life jackets and partaking in water-centric activities. Both the OSMB and WVVA invite additional partners to commit to using their digital platforms (click here) to promote life jacket wear with the same shared goal of making this behavior more socially acceptable and desirable — not only for safety, but for more fun and less worry on every outing on Oregon’s waterways.
The life jacket safety commitment includes the following actionable items:
- All water recreation imagery created and produced by your agency will show proper life jacket use in children and adults.
- Collaborators and hired content creators (such as social media influencers, bloggers and media) will uphold this commitment in their contracted content.
- Only user-generated content illustrating appropriate life jacket use will be shared.
Unfortunately, the combination of growth in paddling among people new to the activity and COVID-19 meant more recreational boating fatalities in 2020 than in any year since 1987 in Oregon. Seventeen of the 27 fatalities in 2020 likely could have been prevented had victims taken a simple precaution — wearing a properly fitting life jacket.
The following 36 organizations have made the commitment:
- Oregon State Marine Board
- Willamette Valley Visitors Association
- Cascade Outdoor Center/Westfir Lodge
- Travel Lane County
- Mt. Hood and Columbia River Gorge Regional Tourism Alliance
- Albany Visitors Association
- Taste Newberg
- Visit Corvallis
- Travel Southern Oregon
- Benton County Natural Areas, Parks and Events Department
- Willamette Riverkeeper
- City of Independence
- Polk County Board of Commissioners
- Clackamas County Tourism — Oregon’s Mt. Hood Territory
- Lake Oswego Chamber of Commerce
- City of Eugene Recreation
- Corvallis Parks and Recreation
- Travel Salem
- Oregon Youth Sailing Foundation
- Yamhill County Parks
- Oregon Coast Visitors Association
- A Helfrich Outfitter
- Clackamas River Basin Council
- Northwest Canoe Tour
- South Coast Tours
- Oregon Adventure Ministries
- Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership
- Northwest Fishing Adventures
- On the Line Guide Service
- Wanderlust Tours
- Avid4 Adventure
- Nautical Safety Foundation
- Juniper River Adventures
- Peak Sports
- Wilderness Canyon Adventures LLC
- Lane County Parks
For more information, visit the “Partners in Safety” page here. See the life jacket safety toolkit here. For high-resolution images, visit here.
