From the — Spring 2019Email: info@greenplayllc.com

In over 20 years of creating, updating, and implementing

parks, recreation, open space, and trails master planning projects, GreenPlay staff have seen many trends in the field come and go. One such movement that has emerged in the last couple of decades (and gained momentum in recent years) is the role that parks and recreation play in overall public health. As obesity has reached epidemic levels, stress levels have risen, and public health has moved into the forefront of society, community leaders are increas-ingly recognizing the benefits that parks and recreation give to the community, particularly when it comes to encourag-ing healthy lifestyles.

This realization isn’t new, but is be-coming more prevalent in parks and recreation planning. So much so, that

GreenPlay CEO, Dr. Teresa Penbrooke, has spent a sizable portion of her career helping to show the correlation be-tween parks and recreation and preven-tive public health. She is also currently the Director of the Healthy Communi-ties Research Group for GP RED (www.gpred.org), and in 2017, completed her doctoral dissertation (Local Parks and Recreation Agencies Use of Systems Thinking to Address Preventive Public Health Factors) on the topic.

A New Initiative EmergesThe seeds for the Healthy Communities Research Group were planted by a chance meeting between Dr. Penbrooke, Dr. Robby Layton, and Dr. David M. Compton at an NRPA confer-ence in 2009. Says Teresa, “Dave invited Robby and me to breakfast to talk about the tools that we had been using, spe-cifically the GRASP® analysis for plan-ning, because he saw that it might be a strong contributor to how we could

potentially analyze community preven-tive health. We started talking with him, and we all got very excited. He invited and funded us to come to Indiana Uni-versity (IU) to do a presentation for staff there about the work that we had been doing. He then invited us to join their Healthy Communities team. I was then named as the Project Manager for that team for a couple of years.”

Dr. Compton and his team at IU began a pilot project in Bloomington, Indiana, which served as the “alpha site” and the model for other communities that would follow. The initial goal of the project was, according to the Healthy Communities Research Group work-book published in 2011 by Indiana Uni-versity, as follows: “While the healthy communities movement nationally has been underway, there is a paucity of empirical evidence that public parks and recreation is a causal agent of change in the health and well-being of

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How Parks and Recreation Contribute to Public Health ThroughPlanningby Alaina Brandenburger

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From the — Spring 2019Email: info@greenplayllc.com

its citizens. As well, there is no existing structural mechanism that can serve as a platform for designing interventions to affect behavioral change in these departments. Our Healthy Communities Surveillance and Management Project™ (SMT) was designed to address this major gap in managing public parks and recreation, to reposition itself as a major player in positive community health.”

Moving on to Beta SitesDuring the initial study, management of the Healthy Communities Research Group shifted from Indiana University to GP RED when Dr. Compton retired. As Teresa said, “When Dr. Compton left the university, he offered to bring the HCRG work to GP RED, and then joined the GP RED Advisory Board. He helped complete some of the initial projects. The second project was in South Bend, Indiana, and then we added additional Beta sites in Liberty, Missouri, and Ar-lington Heights, Illinois, to further test and validate the toolkit.” The Beta site projects helped to refine the tools that were emerging with each new commu-nity. One key aspect for success that Dr. Penbrooke noticed early on was that the successful beta sites had to have a strong internal leader who would push for the project. “They’ve all had a very

strong champion at the top. Usually, it has been the parks and recreation director who has been really good at partnering with people from the public health realm and the schools and aca-demic realm, so they’ve been able to create a coalition that would help fund the beta site project.”

An early finding from the work on the alpha and early beta sites was that many communities are faced with similar issues related to public health. Dr. Penbrooke said, “The health factors themselves emerged from both the research literature and the stakeholder engagement in each community. The key health factors that we address now are physical activity, nutrition, transportation and being able to get around town, safety and perception of safety, and the social engagement and

parental engagement. More recently, the focus on the access to nature has emerged, along with a focus on the ability to reduce stress, and substance and alcohol abuse.” She went on to talk about how these health factors relat-ed to her PhD. “Those health factors emerged as similar key factors that each of the agencies were trying to address in one way or another, and as I went back to get my PhD, a large part of that work was to validate whether or not those are the factors that can truly be modified through parks and recreation. From focused research with 17 agencies across the country and Canada, the an-swer was ‘yes.’ These are the key health factors that we can address. The key finding though is that the priority for which health factor is most important in that community to address is different in every community.”

Broader ApplicationsDr. Penbrooke continues to work for GP RED and GreenPlay to help other communities use the SMT to figure out which health factors are the priority for their resources, and how to address them for best outcomes. GreenPlay has also developed tools that can be used to evaluate a parks and recreation system for factors that can contribute to public health. In some communi-ties, this has been as simple as adding GRASP® Active to the inventory and lev-el of service analysis. This tool evaluates components within parks and other amenities within the system based on how they can help the community become more active. For example, this tool was used in the City of Golden, Col-orado to assess how the system could help people enhance their levels of physical activity. Rather than simply in-ventorying the system and ranking how many parks there were per population, the GreenPlay team was able to identify how the parks and facilities contribute to potential energy expenditures of the

people using them. The master planning process helped the City identify gaps in the parks and recreation system where people might not have easy access to the parks and recreation components that were of the highest opportunity for energy expenditures.

Going ForwardIn the 10 years that have passed since the initial alpha site research by the Healthy Communities Research Group, the idea of parks and recreation influ-encing public health has become more widely accepted, and it is now being including in many community planning efforts, from parks and recreation to transportation planning. While com-pleting parks and recreation master planning projects, GreenPlay has noticed broader attention being given to factors like connectivity, encouraging alternative methods of transportation like hiking and biking, social equity, and accessibility throughout the parks and recreation system.

Recently, a combined project for the Hutchinson Recreation Commission and the City of Hutchinson, Kansas, com-pleted a detailed Healthy Communities assessment as part of the Parks and Recreation Master Plan update. That plan, which was funded in large part

by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas, found that a key barrier to participation in parks and recreation in the City was equitable participation and access to facilities and programs from various geographic and demographic groups, along with the perception of safety. Although evidence shows that the crime rates in Hutchinson have actually de-creased, people perceive certain areas (like some trail segments) as not being safe. States Dr. Penbrooke, “In a couple of our communities, perception of safe-ty is the most important factor, because if people don’t feel safe or if the parents don’t feel safe, they won’t let their kids do things. Even though crime rates are lower in most communities in the Unit-ed States now, there is often increased fear. Part of that has to do with social media and the press that nationally reports every single thing that happens. People are more afraid to let their kids go out on their own, even if the crime rates are much lower than they’ve ever been in most places.”

GreenPlay and GP RED now partner on a variety of projects to tie this research with a broad level parks and recreation planning. States Dr. Penbrooke, “We use a toolkit approach that looks at the whole community as a system. Imple-menting various methodologies that are part of the SMT, such as a Multi-At-tribute Utilities Technique (MAUT) with key stakeholders, the Youth Activities and Nutrition Survey (YANS), the quali-

tative and proximity focused component based inventory and level of service analysis (we use GRASP®), and the very organized process to look at each of the elements, has really allowed us to get to the ‘how’ we can do something about it. We have found that once we work through all of those processes and methods, we are able to pull together an action plan that can lead to strong, focused, implementation goals and outcomes.”

Dr. Penbrooke has also noted that these healthy communities research endeav-ors are being championed by a broader range of stakeholders than just parks and recreation agencies. “The answer has never been that parks and recre-ation has to do this by themselves. It’s really about how do they work within the community and with the partners and the stakeholders that they have there, to leverage what needs to be done and be a key player at the table.”

She said, “We are seeing that attention to preventive health is becoming more and more important in community, and the medical and insurance fields are really starting to recognize the benefits of partnering with parks and recreation. We have a lot of opportunities, like park prescription programs, that are fairly new and developing across the country. The insurance companies are starting to realize that they can have a strong re-turn on investment if they can improve public health through this preventive type of system, including improving access to nature, facilities, trails, and other things that the community may already provide.”

Agencies interested in adding a healthy communities analysis to a parks and recreation master plan, or those who simply want to know more about any of these aspects can contact GreenPlay at: Info@greenplayllc.com.

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From the — Spring 2019Email: info@greenplayllc.com