The HEAL Cities and Towns Campaign provided free technical assistance and training to help municipal leaders in Maryland’s and Virginia’s cities and towns adopt policies that improved their communities’ physical activity and food environments.

The project aimed to:  

Educate: Campaign staff helped local government leaders understand their role in creating healthy communities. The team helped leaders recognize how health behaviors are affected by the environments in which we live, work, and play. It showed government leaders how to implement policies and practices that promoted healthy eating and active living.

Assess: The team worked with municipalities to help them assess their existing policies and practices affected the community’s health. We provided a menu of policies and practices that identified new opportunities to promote healthy eating and active living among residents and government employees.  Recognizing that both the interests and needs of cities and towns vary widely throughout the region, the HEAL Cities & Towns Campaign provided free technical assistance on a wide range of policies and practices — from planning pedestrian and bicycle friendly streets to the adoption of healthy vending policies.

Adopt: As a first step to taking action on creating healthy, more prosperous communities, municipalities articulated their new policy and practiced goals in a HEAL Resolution. The Resolution served as a roadmap to improve the municipality’s physical activity and food environments. The team also provided free technical assistance as the municipalities implemented their Resolution goals. Technical assistance included: working with HEAL staff in-person or over-the-phone; presentations, model policies, fact sheets, webinars, training, and marketing materials.

Outcome:

At the end of the project, 65 local jurisdictions in Maryland and Virginia, covering nearly 2 million people, had adopted resolutions and other policies and practices to shape their communities into places where it is easier for residents and employees to make healthy choices about physical activity and nutrition.

The HEAL Cities & Towns Campaign for the Mid-Atlantic was a part of a growing national campaign that included California, Oregon, and Colorado. IPHI embarked on this initiative in 2012 with funding from Kaiser Permanente, a founding partner, and a strategic partnership with the Maryland & Virginia Municipal Leagues.