Hello! We’re your local council, and we need your help
Looking after the health of people in our community is one of the important jobs that local councils do. In 2021, for example, we will be busy creating our Municipal Public Health and Wellbeing Plan. This Plan will guide how we will work over the next few years to make our neighbourhood a healthier place to live.
We are going to be designing places and spaces that kids, like you, use. These spaces include local streets, parks, playgrounds, sportsgrounds, libraries and shopping areas.
It is important that we understand how things can make it easier or harder to be healthy for everyone who lives in our community. To help with this, we want to know what you think and how you would like to use places and spaces in your neighbourhood.
Your input and ideas will help us to plan for and build healthier places for you, your family and everyone else. We’ll work together, which is why we call this ‘co-design’.
How you can help
We would like you to help us understand just how healthy your neighbourhood is, especially how the different spaces and places contribute to healthy eating and being active. There are three phases to this project.
Phase 1: learning about healthy places
We need you to collect and send us some information to help us learn about what you think is important.
When we think about what makes a healthy place we need to think about its physical and social features.
Physical features are things we can see. Examples of physical features might be whether you have a park nearby, and what equipment it has, or whether there are a lot of fast food places near you or shops that sell fresh food. It could also be that activities are too expensive and mean that some people might not be able to participate.
Social features might be harder to notice, because these are about how people interact with each other, the different rules that help people understand how to act, or how these spaces might make people feel.
Examples of social features might be:
- not feeling safe or welcome at the park
- what food you see other people eating.
Here is a video you can watch to help you think about how different places and spaces affect healthy eating and being active
The video showed some examples of how the physical and social features in your surroundings can affect healthy eating and being active in different ways.
Of course, there are many other ways that your surroundings can affect your healthy eating or being active. Can you think of some more?