In an effort to improve health outcomes for children, youth, and families, the City of Salinas joined together with the Violent Injury Prevention Coalition (VIPC) and their foundation, Partners for Peace, to launch a community collaborative planning process. The resulting framework, Cultivating Peace in Salinas, focuses primarily on reducing youth violence but also addresses overall community well being.
Improving community environments requires a comprehensive approach that creates bridges across sectors. Over a period of roughly two years, stakeholders in the western unincorporated area of Alameda County (also called "The Eden Area") came together to identify, discuss, and debate the most important issues facing their communities and to develop a collective vision of livable communities and a prioritized set of actions.
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The city of Richmond, California was one of the first cities in the country to develop a comprehensive general plan element that addresses the link between public health and community design.
Developed by the Seattle Housing Authority, Cultivating Communities is a neighborhood gardening program for low-income communities in Seattle, Washington. The program has provided lead-free gardening plots, increased availability of healthy food, and promoted social connections and trust between community members.
In 2004, the voters of Olympia, Washington approved a 3% utility tax to improve their parks, sidewalks, and open space. With the new revenue, the city has purchased land for two neighborhood parks and sidewalk improvements are well underway.
In Escondido, California, an Interim Land-Use Policy has helped to support urban agriculture, increase access to fresh food, and create a community that supports healthy eating.
With an alarming amount of vacant lots present within their city, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS), along with other community and municipal partners, have developed a program to clean, green, and maintain these vacant lots in order to improve their community and health. In order to provide evidence that improvement of these vacant lots has positive effects on the community and health, PHS began a 10-year long longitudinal study comparing vacant lots against treated lots.
A diverse group of partners in South Los Angeles recently broke ground on a new Wellness Center and healing garden to serve Los Angeles Unified School District students and the surrounding community.
Twenty-six municipalities in Arapahoe, Adams and Douglas counties are developing master plans to support healthy eating and active living, including developing sustainable partnerships between schools and parks.
Slavic Village Development (SVD) is a community development corporation located in Cleveland, Ohio that works with the Broadway neighborhood. With a population consisting of mostly working class, middle to lower income families, Slavic Village Development was faced with the challenge of improving a community that undergoing increasing foreclosures and perceptions of a lack of safety. In 2003, SVD received a grant from the Active Living by Design program to begin an initiative to rebrand Broadway as "a community on the move."
