Trailnet and American Planning Association Missouri Chapter receive $60,000 grant funding from American Planning Association

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Trailnet and the American Planning Association Missouri Chapter (APA Missouri) are excited to announce that APA Missouri is the recipient of a $60,000 grant through the American Planning Association’s Planners4Health initiative. The initiative’s goal is to create stronger, healthier communities. This grant allows for a continued partnership between Trailnet and APA Missouri to focus on educating planners and public health professionals on the health impacts of street design. Trailnet is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization; its mission is to lead in fostering healthy, active, and vibrant communities where walking, bicycling, and the use of public transit are ways of life.

Trailnet and APA Missouri have been working together since February 2015 on the Plan4Health initiative, which involved pop-up traffic calming demonstrations throughout the city of St. Louis. The project received positive reviews from community members, city staff, and elected officials within St. Louis, attracting national and international attention.

As a result of the Plan4Health initiative, permanent crosswalk improvements were constructed in front of Woodward Elementary School, beautification projects sprouted in several neighborhoods, and awareness was raised to such a level that the city of St. Louis created a traffic calming ordinance. Trailnet also created a manual Slow Your Street: A How-To Guide for Pop-Up Traffic Calming to provide easy-to-follow instructions so that organizers could create additional demonstrations.

This six-month initiative, sponsored by the American Planning Association (APA), will ensure planners and public health professionals have access to information and resources that encourage communities to plan and create policies for healthy living. Trailnet and APA Missouri will use the grant to broadly share knowledge and resources on building coalitions with public health professionals, and to integrate public health into local and regional planning practices. The focus of the project, in partnership with the Missouri Council of Activity and Nutrition, is to share lessons learned from the Plan4Health project throughout the state.

“This is a significant opportunity to enhance local planning efforts to create healthier communities and establish a strong legacy of collaboration between planners and public health professionals,” said Anna Ricklin, AICP, manager of APA’s Planning and Community Health Center. “Through APA Missouri’s efforts, even more professionals will have access to best practices and resources to further advance healthy communities.”

Trailnet will travel across the state to assist APA Missouri in hosting at least three pop-up traffic calming demonstrations, using the successes in metro St. Louis as a model. “The goal of this project is to share our insight across the state so APA Missouri members and public health professionals interested in promoting safer and healthier street designs have the resources to do so,” said Grace Kyung, planning manager at Trailnet.

"APA Missouri is excited for the opportunity to take the knowledge learned from the Plan4Health project in St. Louis and share it with our APA members across the state," said Hilary Perkins, AICP, president of the Missouri Chapter of the American Planning Association. "Planners4Health will help us further our chapter outreach to cross-collaborate with public health professionals to build healthier communities."

The Planners4Health initiative marks the three-year culmination of APA’s $9 million Plan4Health program that works to combat two determinants of chronic disease – lack of physical activity and lack of access to nutritious foods. Funding for the initiative is provided through a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Information about Trailnet and APA Missouri’s work through Planners4Health can be found at http://trailnet.org/ or http://www.mo-apa.org/.

Visit http://www.planning.org/nationalcenters/health/planners4health for information about the overall program.

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Trailnet and American Planning Association Missouri Chapter receive $60,000 grant funding from American Planning Association