When youth are involved in extracurricular activities like sports, band, drama clubs, student government, or community service, protection increases and they are less likely to be involved in substance use and delinquency.
According to research, changes to a community’s environment can reduce risk factors and increase protective factors for youth. Such changes are shown to impact youth behaviors, as they can create spaces that promote positive social norms, improve perceived and actual safety, and decrease youth involvement in risky behaviors such as substance misuse and violence.
Activities within this strategy focus on a community’s built environment, which is part of a community’s ‘physical environment’, refers to the human-made or altered environments that provide settings for human activity (e.g., buildings, parks, roads). The built environment is especially influential in the creation and maintenance of settings that allow for and encourage community members–including youth–to gather to foster social relationships and increase feelings of connectedness. Additionally, changes to the physical or built environment can reduce existing barriers that may limit access to safe places for youth to engage in prosocial activities and avoid exposure to unhealthy behaviors.
Examples of this work include building new structures and/or renovating existing areas (e.g., abandoned building and vacant lot remediation), increasing lighting, organizing clean-up days, addressing security and safety concerns, connecting transportation systems (e.g., transit, trails, and safe places to walk/bike to places frequently visited (e.g., school, work, grocery, community amenities) and creating green space. These approaches can also be applied in schools and other settings where young people frequently interact., Your coalition may choose this strategy if they believe physical and built infrastructure improvements may be influential in promoting youth connection and access to prosocial opportunities.
Understand healthy community design. Before your coalition dives into this work, you should build a shared understanding and knowledge base of what healthy community design is.
Resources:
Built Environment webpage at Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment offers up to date resources, funding ideas, newsletters, and Built Environment staff contacts.
Elements of a Healthy, Equitable Community from ChangeLab Solutions provides a high level overview of why healthy, equitable communities are essential.
Identify key decision makers and those with power involved in work around this topic. Efforts to change the physical and built environment of a community often involve governmental and non-governmental partners (e.g., city planners, legislators, businesses, parks and recreation), so their involvement may be critical for your coalition’s success. The right decision-makers need to be at the table and willing to do their part. If you do not have relationships or representation from these key decision makers, you may consider forming those partnerships as your first step. Examples of this may include: meeting with individuals and organizations who specialize in this area to ask them what helps and if they would like to join the coalition or setting up calls with decision makers to see if they are willing to use their position of power to support your efforts via implementing policies or reallocating resources.
Resources:
The Community Toolbox offers a list of important partners to engage in your efforts.
CDC’s Active People, Healthy Nation’s Tools for Action webpage provides specifics for how many types of partners from Arts & Culture to Transportation have a role in encouraging built environment changes for physical activity, which uses complementary strategies to healthy community design.
Colorado communities can learn more about local and municipal comprehensive plans for land use already drafted throughout the state. These plans may help your coalition understand key partners and existing plans and efforts happening within this area.
ChangeLab Solutions offers a Long Range Planning for Health Equity and Prosperity to further understand how to connect comprehensive (or long range) plans to public health.
The National Academy of Community Organizers offers A Guide to Power Analysis in Community Organizing, which can help coalitions understand where power sits within a community around a particular issue.
Understand how systemic inequities impact the physical environment of communities. Neighborhood socio-economic status is linked to the availability and quality of community spaces and programs for youth, so as a coalition, you should seek to understand the connection to ensure your efforts do not further entrench inequities.
Resources:
Learn about the historic impact systemic racism has had on the placement of parks and open spaces in the Prevention Institute’s publication “Changing the Landscape: People, Parks, and Power”. The report suggests a framework communities should use to "guide the park and green space equity movement’s approach to changing policies and systems, with a focus on scaling up to achieve population-level impacts."
Your coalition should also consider the potential impacts of changes to the built environment on gentrification. The Urban Land Institute’s Colorado chapter offers guidance for equitable revitalization.
As a part of their ‘Five Building Blocks for Racial Equity’, the Race Matters Institute of JustPartners, Inc. offers a free guide on conducting
a Racial Equity Backmap, which helps groups and individuals consider and identify the various drivers of a given inequity.
Consider using an Equity Impact Assessment to better explore and understand such consequences. Both the Center for the Study of Social Policy and Race Forward offer free resources.
The Government Alliance on Race and Equity offers Racial Equity Toolkit An Opportunity to Operationalize Equity.
It is important to note that the uniqueness of your community, its resources, and its needs will ultimately determine what implementation of this strategy will look like. Additionally, it is important for your coalition to approach this strategy in a way that is aligned with your overarching goal(s). The list below offers suggestions and ideas of evidence-informed actions your coalition can consider taking as part of your implementation of this strategy.
Support or lead efforts to assess your community’s environment. The identification and examination of the physical characteristics of housing, schools, and community areas (e.g., parks, business areas, public transportation hubs) is an important initial step to identify the specific needs of a community. A variety of tools and processes exist to help communities assess and understand the built environment around them by collecting information such as sidewalk availability, green space access, land use, and traffic volume. These tools can provide baseline information, identify existing barriers and concerns, help assess health outcomes, and identify suitable changes to invest resources in.
Resources:
The CDC offers resources for understanding and measuring the built environment, including Active Communities Toolkit.
One tool your community can use is Photovoice, a process that involves community members using photography to visually communicate their experiences and environment. Guidance is provided in the following:
Storytelling can be an effective way to share the everyday experiences of people in your community, which can create powerful messaging and examples to share with decision makers.
As discussed within other strategies, your coalition can also help facilitate community mapping (sometimes called “asset mapping”). Community mapping is a data-driven process that results in a visualization of community resources (social, cultural, economic), assets, concerns, and opportunities located within a community. Mapping activities can help communities identify specific locations that need physical improvement. The are numerous online resources that include a “how to” guide, as well as case studies showcasing how the community mapping process has been used in communities:
There are many resources online with instructions on how to use Google Maps, a free and easily shareable online resource, to facilitate community mapping.
Additionally, hot spot mapping is a data-driven activity that supports communities by identifying spaces that are safe and unsafe and encouraging conversations about how to address areas of concern.
The National Institute of Justice’s report, “Mapping Crime: Understanding Hot Spots” is a comprehensive guide to hot spot mapping.
Watch a Colorado community that has utilized hot spot mapping here and read more about the use of hot spot mapping in Colorado here.
Measure “network connectivity”, or how easily people can travel from one place to another within a community. Resources to understand this indicator specifically for youth include:
Similarly, to measure walkability, you can use Walk Score, which rates and measures walkability based on the variety and distance of an address to educational, retail, food, entertainment, and recreational locations. It should be noted that, while Walk Score considers the number of destinations in an area, it does not take into account the quality of destinations, the aesthetics, or safety of the walking environment.
ParkScore and ParkServe are resources that can be used to measure the density of greenspace parks within a community. ParkScore looks at current acreage, investment, amenities, and access. ParkServe can be used to determine locations for future parks based on the greatest need. Colorado Parks and Wildlife partnered with the Trust for Public Land to conduct a 10-Minute Walk and 10-Mile Drive proximity analysis to open space, parks, trails, and water across the state. This tool can help identify areas that lack safe access to parks that are close to home.
Identify and support efforts to share voice and power with decision makers. To emphasize Positive Youth Development, be sure to include young people in all activities as decision makers and facilitators, not solely as participants. This could include young people developing maps of physical or built spaces that are safe/unsafe, advising or developing the process for facilitation, co-facilitating the process, analyzing their own results, and presenting the results directly to their school administrators and/or community leaders. Diverse youth or community member representation is essential so that the data captured reflects the entire community’s experiences.
Resources:
Working Together to Make Meaningful Change by Safe Routes Partnership. This resource is for individuals, organizations, and government agencies that are working on community engagement in Colorado; it includes resources and tools to develop and deepen community engagement processes using a people-centered framework.
Identify and support existing efforts to change your community’s physical environment. As discussed earlier, changes to the physical and built environment of a community can result in positive health impacts for all of its members, including youth. These efforts can range in scope and some may already be underway in your community.
Resources:
Active People, Healthy Nation (APHN) has a list of evidence-based community design strategies to increase access to physical activity across sectors and settings.
Colorado Downtown Streets - This publication is meant to aid both Colorado communities and the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) in striking a balance between the many demands that face our downtown streets, particularly where a main street is also a state highway. It provides options for how to increase safety for all users across all modes of travel through creative and flexible design.
Revitalizing Main Streets program enhances active transportation safety and strengthens the connection of people to main streets and central economic hubs. The program encourages physical activity and enhances local economic vitality in towns and cities across Colorado through funding infrastructure improvements to make walking and biking easy, yielding long-term benefits that bolster community connections.
The Community Tool Box includes an entire chapter on changing the built environment, including examples of common activities and case studies of effective past efforts across the U.S.
Community Wellness Hubs: A Toolkit for Advancing Community Health and Well-Being Through Parks and Recreation contains evidence and practice-based strategies, resources, and case study examples to advance parks and recreation as Community Wellness Hubs.
Placemaking is a creative way to demonstrate how built environment changes in a community could function; these often start as a “pilot” or “temporary” installment and can become permanent with community support and funding.
For more placemaking resources, visit the Project for Public Spaces website.
The Community Tool Box also specifically covers establishing neighborhood beautification programs and provides resources and case studies.
Useful Community Development provides guidance and information on community beautification.
Organize neighborhood clean-up days to increase community buy-in for beautification projects. Neighborhood clean-up days involve convening a group of people to clean up all or part of a community. Such efforts have the potential to bring about a number of positive outcomes which can lead to longer sustained built environment changes. They also serve as a great opportunity to build buy-in and harness civic engagement in the community.
Resources:
The Community Tool Box contains a section on Conducting Neighborhood Cleanup Programs, which provides guidance for individuals and organizations interested in these efforts.
Keep America Beautiful has a wide variety of resources and tools for neighborhood beautification projects and ideas.
Support existing or facilitate efforts to improve transportation safety through art, complete streets, and the streetscape design within your community. Improving the design of streetscapes (e.g., roadway designs) provides benefits to an entire community, by allowing pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders, and motorists to all share and use streets within a community. Examples of streetscape improvements include increased street lighting, enhanced street landscaping, increased sidewalk connectivity, bicycling infrastructure, street crossing safety features, and traffic calming measures. Research has shown such efforts can improve a community’s safety while also increasing a sense of community among residents.
Resources:
County Health Rankings & Roadmaps offers an overview of this approach and compiles a list of implementation resources.
Vision Zero is a movement to reduce traffic fatalities to zero. Many strategies used in Vision Zero require community engagement from people of all ages and abilities to improve transportation, access and safety.
Smart Growth America offers resources and guidance specifically on educating stakeholders on policy solutions to support improvements in streetscape design.
The state of Colorado released “ Colorado Downtown Street: A Tool for Communities, Planners, and Engineers” which is designed to aid Colorado communities in improving streetscape design.
The Green Infrastructure Guide to Downtown Colorado introduces and identifies green infrastructure best management practices for downtown streets. It is an expansion of the Colorado Downtown Streets publication and considers stormwater management and the benefits of adding vegetation on downtown streets.
The U.S. Department of Transportation compiles complete street implementation resources and case studies of successful implementation of similar efforts.
Bloomberg has an extensive "how to guide" for creating asphalt art projects and has even conducted studies demonstrating the effectiveness of asphalt art as a transportation safety strategy.
Safe Routes to Parks Resource Guide provides professionals with resources to plan, design, and implement safe and accessible biking, walking, and wheelchair rolling to parks.
Educate stakeholders on the benefits of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED). CPTED is a specific approach to designing safety and security into the environment of a specific area focusing on five areas: 1) natural surveillance, 2) access control, 3) territorial reinforcement, 4) activity support, and 5) maintenance. Research supports its ability to improve safety within a community.
Resources
Learn more about CPTED from the International CPTED Association and the National Crime Prevention Council.
Everytown discusses community success stories in their report “Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design”.
CPTED best practices are described in “Best Practices for Using Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design in Weed and Seed Sites”.
Support existing and/or facilitate efforts to develop and implement climate health adaptation plans, such as heat action plans, to help communities prepare for the health effects of climate change.
Resources
Apply the CDC Building Resilience Against Climate Effects (BRACE) Framework. This is a five step process that includes anticipating vulnerabilities, projecting the disease burden, assessing public health interventions, developing adaptation plans, and evaluating impacts.
Integrate Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion using the Climate Change and Health Playbook. The CDC’s resource page on climate and community health has many resources including toolkits on how to talk about the impacts of climate and health and how to create a community coordinated effort to address concerns.
Visit CDC’s HeatRisk Tool to access local heat risk data and resources. You can also visit CDPHE’s Heat and Health webpage for more information.
Consider opportunities to support cooling centers, clean air shelters, and resilience hubs, which are physical spaces that serve as community centers for education, services, and community capacity. They can enhance community resilience, reduce burdens on local emergency response teams, improve access to public health resources and services, and distribute resources and funding to priority communities and those that need them the most.