June 2022 - Parks & Recreation - 34

WELLNESS HUBS
NRPA defines Community Wellness
Hubs as trusted gathering
places that connect every member
of the community to essential
programs, services and spaces that
advance health equity, improve
health outcomes and enhance
quality of life. Community Wellness
Hubs build on the existing
strengths, assets and foundations of
local park and recreation agencies
to create greater public awareness
about health and well-being. They
reinforce this work by leveraging
partnerships and the resources,
skills and knowledge of other sectors
to integrate new programs and
services across multiple dimensions
of well-being into the community.
Community Wellness Hubs call
upon park and recreation agencies
to function in a more holistic, intentional
and interconnected way.
At the core of this work is equity.
Community Wellness Hubs are
grounded in a recognition of unfair
systems and how these systems
have primarily benefited powerful
and privileged social groups while
burdening disenfranchised populations.
To advance health equity,
Community Wellness Hubs must
be developed by and with the people
most impacted by inequity, and
they must focus on systems change
approaches,
including
changing
practices, policies, power structures,
norms and environments to
achieve transformational change.
Between 2020 and early 2022,
NRPA worked with 15 communities
to develop Community Wellness
Hubs specifically focused on
supporting food access, improving
food
security,
connecting
nutrition
people
to social resources, and providing
evidence-based
education
to improve healthy eating behaviors.
These projects built off
the existing nutrition services that
park and recreation agencies were
already providing to community
members (serving as meal sites for
youth and older adults, providing
Challenging Norms and
Understanding Community
Needs
In the first phase of the grant,
agencies were guided through two
primary
phases - partnership
building and conducting a needs
assessment
to
better understand
community challenges and wants.
Agencies formed cross-sector project
teams and worked as teams to
conduct a needs assessment. Fifteen
needs assessments were conducted
across the cohort, providing
community
and individual-level
data that was used to inform their
hub strategies.
City of Bloomington (Indiana)
Parks and Recreation partnered with
The Indiana University, School of
Public Health Department of Health
and Wellness Design - Bloomington
to construct and implement a health
and nutrition needs assessment
survey. Many of the survey results
countered what they anticipated and
Meals are provided to community
members through Asheville Parks and
Recreation in North Carolina.
34 Parks & Recreation | JUNE 2 0 22 | PARK S ANDRECRE AT ION . OR G
nutrition education, supporting
community gardens, managing
farmers markets and providing
mobile meal services). They also
worked to advance innovative and
upstream approaches to increase access
to healthy food. With support
from NRPA and a network of technical
assistance providers, including
the Alliance for a Healthier Generation,
National Association of
County and City Health Officials,
Farmers Market Coalition and the
Food Research and Action Center,
grantees were guided through an
18-month-long process to center
equity within their operations, programs
and services, and implement
systems change strategies.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ASHEVILLE PARKS AND RECREATION
June 2022 - Parks & Recreation

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