City

Now Accepting Session Proposals Until March 4, 2024
Session Proposal Deadline EXTENDED Until March 25, 2024 11:59pm PT
 

Contributing authors: Margo Pedroso, Marisa Jones, Michelle Lieberman, Kari Schlosshauer, Demi Espinoza, and Cass Isidro

While traditional community engagement activities like neighborhood walk audits are not possible during COVID-19, there are creative ways to continue equitable community engagement during the time of social distancing.

Photo: The Gender Spectrum Collection

The City of Philadelphia closed a major road to cars to create more space for people to walk and bike at a socially safe distance during the covid-19 pandemic.

Colorful crosswalks. Temporary bike lanes. Playful paths. Creating new green space. These are just a few ways to improve local park access. We just wrapped up work with our first cohort of communities in the Safe Routes to Parks Activating Communities program, which provides individualized consultation, group trainings, and grant funding to nonprofits to improve safe, equitable park access in their communities.

In winter 2017, our team got a question: “Have you ever looked at how people can walk to and from grocery stores from senior centers? Maybe Safe Routes to Grocery Stores?” We were thrilled. We had been working for the past year to refine a concept called Safe Routes to Healthy Food, which works to overcome the barriers to walking, biking, and taking public transportation to places where people get healthy foods. This was a chance to dive in to see how the challenges and solutions we’d been exploring played out in a real neighborhood. Asian Services in Action, Inc.