Keqiao District (Shaoxing, China) has been designated as a World Leisure Community of Excellencefor 2018 by the World Leisure Organization (WLO). This title recognizes Keqiao’s innovative and successful use of leisure to improve its citizens’ quality of life.
“As an open, inclusive, leisure and innovative emerging city, Keqiao will regard this honor as a new starting point and firmly develop leisure as a significant approach to enhance the welfare of our citizens”, says Zhijiang Shen, Party Secretary of Keqiao District Committee. “We sincerely invite friends all over the world come to Keqiao for sightseeing, boating, skiing, experiencing culture and having fun”. Rulang Zhao, Deputy Party Secretary of Keqiao District Committee and Governor of Keqiao District declares: “Being awarded as a World Leisure Community of Excellence, the highest leisure honor in the world, will be an important milestone for Keqiao District to gather cohesive, high-quality, modern and competitive development forces. In the future, we will continue to promote sports as a form of leisure by sports, enhance fashion-related leisure, cultivate taste through fashion, and create a high-quality life circle to meet our citizens’ yearning for a better life”.
Last December 2018, the WLO advised Keqiao District staff that there had been a unanimous decision to recognize and designate the Keqiao District as a World Leisure Community of Excellence for 2018. In its announcement, the WLO stated, “the District of Keqiao is being recognized with this award for its remarkable contributions as a community to promoting leisure as a means to enhance the human condition. Keqiao serves as an exemplar of how to build a sense of community by educating its citizens in leisure through diversified activities, enhancing leisure as essential to the social, cultural, economic, and sustainable environmental development of the community”.
The title World Leisure Community of Excellence is given to communities that have successfully used leisure in all its forms to reinvent themselves and to improve the economic, social and cultural lives of their citizens, and that have made substantive contributions consistent with advancing the mission of WLO. In so doing, WLO brings global attention to the excellence communities have achieved through working together with their citizens to promote leisure as a means to enhance the human condition.
The WL Communities of Excellence application is a permanently open call. We invite communities around the world who actively promote leisure to improve their citizens’ life quality to apply and join Keqiao, Richmond (Canada) and Jingde County (China) in the WL Communities of Excellence network!
