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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:

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?

Phase 2: collecting information about your everyday places 

Next, we would like you to think about where you live and the places where you go in your neighbourhood and answer the following question:

What are the physical and social features of your neighbourhood that might affect healthy eating and being active?


There are lots of different ways you could collect information (called ‘data’) to help answer the question.

But for this task we want you to audit your local neighbourhood. By ‘audit’ we mean we want you to look closely at the neighbourhood you live in and then collect data about it. Data is any kind of evidence that helps us answer the question.

We want you to take photos or draw pictures of the places that you want us to see and think about. You’ll then create a digital story for us.

Your story should be shorter than two minutes. Here are some options you might use to add to your digital story:

Can you think of anything else to include in your digital story? Think about the best way to capture and describe your local places and spaces.

Resources to help you

To help you create your digital story, head over to the Kids Gallery to see some examples of data that other kids have collected. See how they‘ve added arrows, circles and words to highlight important information. 

You’ll notice that there are no people in our images – if there had been people in the photos they would have had to have their faces edited out with emojis or made blurry. You will need to do this too.

Adobe Spark is a tool you could use to make and edit your digital story. Check out these two videos to learn how you can use Adobe Spark to:

When you have finished your digital story, share it with us by using the link below. 

When you click on the link you will be asked to provide some basic information about yourself and then you will be asked to upload your files.

Upload your audit here View terms of use

What happens next?

Phase 3: the Kids Co-designing Healthy Places workshop

Once you’ve uploaded your digital story, either your teacher or the council staff running the project will add them to the digital stories from all the other kids doing the project. All the data that have been collected will be used in a workshop to come up with possible solutions for creating healthier places. Depending on how many kids the organisers can include, you or your class might be invited to the workshop to look at all the stories and help use the information to co-design healthy solutions.

Some time after the workshop, the council will report back to you about how they used your solutions in their plans.