What Happened?
Communities across the country are deploying strategies to keep local residents happy, healthy and productive in the community. To achieve these ends, city leaders are investing in local wellness initiatives that focus on quality of life and healthy choices.
Wellbeing Data Project
Santa Monica, California, has launched a wellbeing project designed to optimize public data to better understand how healthy the community truly is. The Santa Monica Wellbeing Project is a three-tiered initiative working to identify and test short- and long-term solutions to public health and wellness:
- Define what a city needs to be sustainable and thrive
- Collect community wellness data to gauge current state of the city
- Assemble community and city leaders to collaborate on solutions to fix identified problems
Santa Monica partnered with the RAND Corporation, the New Economics Foundation, and data and health experts worldwide to determine what factors impact a community’s long-term success and how best to measure them. The city then developed a streamlined system to continually collect and analyze community data to support real-time decision making to boost efficiency and sustainability. Data collected includes:
- Crime statistics
- Street homelessness
- School attendance rates
- Qualitative stats from individual surveys
- Behavioral analytics
The city has started to tabulate findings from the data that indicate what characteristics or behaviors are creating healthy residents and environments, as well as areas of disparity that need improvement. The Wellbeing Project was made possible through a $1 million grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies innovation campaign.
Recipe Contest
The city of Henderson, Nevada, recently hosted a recipe contest to encourage local residents to submit cooking ideas to be published in a community cookbook. The city of Henderson partnered with the Art Institute of Las Vegas and the Southern Nevada Health District to promote and launch the Healthy Henderson Recipe Contest. The goal of the event is to promote the consumption of healthy foods in the community, while making local residents aware of nutritional cooking and healthy eating best practices.
All local residents were encouraged to submit a unique, original and healthy recipe that meets at least one of the requirements of the event including:
- Containing at least 2 types of fruits or vegetables
- Containing a lean protein
- Containing a whole grain
- Containing a low or fat-free dairy product or milk substitute
Event leaders collected all submissions and selected the top 15 finalists to be invited to an exclusive recipe tasting and judging event. Winners were selected and awards were given to finalists for their appetizers, entrees or desserts based on the following criteria:
- Nutrition
- Originality
- Taste
- Appearance/presentation
The submitted recipes were judged by a team of food service professionals, and representatives from the UNLV Nutrition Department and the Southern Nevada Health District.
Wellness Grant Program
The city of Guelph in Ontario offers a Wellbeing Grant Program that provides aid to nonprofits in the community working to improve local wellness. Nonprofit organizations can apply for small operating, project or capital grant funding that can be used for:
- Core operating funding
- One-off events
- Special programming or projects
- Small capital items
The city evaluates all applications based a number of criteria:
- Contribution to the grant program goals
- Track record
- Need of the organization in the community
After funding has been awarded, each nonprofit must measure how the money was used and submit a final report outlining its impact on the community. This year’s winners of the Wellbeing Grant Program include a community literacy center, mental health services, media arts center and mentorship organization.
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