Friends and Allies in the Walking Movement

Sedentary behavior is a major contributor to rising rates of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other related health problems in the US. America Walks is a non-profit organization that fights against this threat by improving walkability in communities across the country. In collaboration with local governments and organizations, they work to promote and improve pedestrian access, safety, and general use of outdoor space. In an effort to educate others on their successes and failures, they’ve put together several webinars, including one on October 11, 2017 entitled “Friends and Allies in the Walking Movement”. This latest webinar featured representatives from three organizations working to improve walkability in their own cities.

Kim Irwin, the Executive Director of Health by Design, discussed several ways the organization has improved walkability in Indianapolis and surrounding communities. One initiative she highlighted, called “Moving INDY Forward”, engaged heavily with community members and utilized “walking audits”, where they walked around the city talking with local business owners, customers, and city officials. This initiative was successful because the organization took advantage of its connections to the local population to find out what projects were most pertinent to the community and smaller problems that they could solve relatively quickly. A similar group in California, called WALKSacramento, would not have found the success they have without the help of their collaborators. Executive Director Kirin Kumar detailed how their multidisciplinary team consisted of air quality management personnel, private companies, public officers, UC Berkeley, and other universities. Together, this group educated their community, created guidelines to healthier city planning, and received federal funding to put those guidelines into practice. Finally, Honolulu Walks addressed the alarmingly high rate of senior pedestrian injuries and deaths in their city by creating a unique partnership. As Colby Takeda explained, the program worked by infusing the energy and enthusiasm of the youthful generation with the wisdom and curiosity of their senior counterparts. By pairing on a photography project, they learned to see the city through each other’s eyes and saw how enjoyable and safe it can be to walk through.

While the three programs discussed in this webinar used different tactics to address different problems facing their respective cities, they shared a common value of collaboration and teamwork. Public health seems to be a field where collaborations are inherent. For a public health researcher to implement a physical activity intervention, s/he would greatly benefit from recruiting the help of an exercise physiologist to lend the expertise on physical activity s/he may not have. It seems common sense that collaboration should be inherent in research, as no one can have expertise in every aspect involved in his/her area of interest. Instead, exercise scientists often run their research without the consultation of public health researchers because they strive for statistical significance in highly controlled studies, and focus much less on the real-world implication of their results. Researchers should strive for the same values of teamwork that children are taught when they first start school.