5 minute read

Autumn is here, and the cooler weather means one less excuse not to get outside!

Nearly every activity we enjoy outdoors – hiking in a state or national park, working up a sweat at a Pickleball court, or even sharing a meal at a picnic table – is possible thanks to outdoor infrastructure.

What is outdoor infrastructure?
Outdoor infrastructure refers to structures and spaces that allow people to enjoy time outside: parks, playgrounds, urban green spaces, community gardens, walking trails, public pools, sports fields, campgrounds, and much more. Wherever you live – a busy city, a sprawling suburb, or a vast rural area – access to outdoor infrastructure (or a lack thereof) shapes your daily life.

Why is it important?
Making it easy and enjoyable for people to get outside is vital to overall wellness, supporting both physical and mental health. It is especially important for keeping children healthy: Along with a number of cognitive and emotional benefits, playing outdoors empowers kids to get active, helping maintain a healthy body weight.

Dive into VFHY’s community investments
Throughout 2023, VFHY is investing in outdoor infrastructure in the form of playgrounds. Through our partnership with KABOOM!, a national nonprofit dedicated to ending playspace inequity, we have committed to building eight playgrounds across the commonwealth to increase the number of available safe places for Virginia kids to play.

The first VFHY-sponsored playground was built in May 2023 at the Petersburg Family YMCA. Already, its impact has been felt in the community. Marco Callender, Executive Director of the Petersburg YMCA, watched as both YMCA members and visitors enjoyed the playground all summer.

He highlighted that playgrounds not only support kids’ physical health but also are sites for them to build social skills and emotional resilience. Such public outdoor spaces give children opportunities to try new things, solve problems, and collaborate on their own terms.

Read more about our partnership with KABOOM!

But wait, there’s more! 
Read on for two inspiring examples of how our Healthy Communities Action Team (HCAT) grantees are transforming their communities and habits with outdoor infrastructure projects.  

Roanoke Foodshed Network:
Sustainable Community Gardens 

HCAT Arlington:
Flexible StoryWalks™ 

Community gardens fill numerous needs: They provide fresh, healthy, accessible food. They beautify a neighborhood and function as a communal green space that fosters social connections. And in schools, gardens can be used as hands-on education to teach kids about science, nutrition, and more.  

The Roanoke Foodshed Network (RFN) is a coalition of partners creating an equitable and resilient food and farm system in the Roanoke region. Local Environmental Agriculture Project (LEAP), a Roanoke-based nonprofit, serves as the fiscal agent for the network. Over the past year, RFN’s Healthy Food Access Group has been focused on nurturing school community gardens around the area.  

In addition to starting and maintaining community gardens, RFN has invested in infrastructure to make these resources stronger. The Network provides financial support to community partners to purchase supplies and support staff to maintain the garden.  

A major challenge facing community gardens, especially those in schools, is finding regular, long-term support. Teachers and school administrators often are already overwhelmed with daily responsibilities and do not have the capacity to water and weed a garden plot every day.  

The financial support provided by RFN has helped address this problem. Additionally, one community partner, Shawn Jadrnicek, an Agriculture Extension Agent with Virginia Cooperative Extension, offered a solution. He implemented a number of infrastructure improvements to make the gardens more low-maintenance, such as adding an automated irrigation system so they do not have to be watered by hand. 

Maureen McGonagle, LEAP’s director of regional partnerships, said, “Public outdoor infrastructure is an incredibly powerful thing in a community because it gives space for people to convene, and the social connections that can be formed in those spaces can have ripple effects we can’t even anticipate.” 

This work was funded through a VFHY HCAT grant. 

HCAT Arlington has found that temporary infrastructure can have a lasting impact.

HCAT Arlington is a community advocacy group working to prevent childhood obesity in Arlington County. They collaborated with two local organizations, Aspire and Read Early And Daily (READ), to produce two StoryWalks™ in 2022.

Arlington County’s Parks & Recreation department welcomes temporary installations, but permanent structures in the parks are rarely approved. HCAT Arlington found that StoryWalks™ – an example of temporary infrastructure – are a perfect way to implement projects in the area’s parks, as the pages can be removed. They found approximately two months to be the ideal length of time for a StoryWalk.

StoryWalks™ bring literacy, nature, and exercise together by affixing a picture book, page by page, to trees or posts along an outdoor path. The first StoryWalk™ implemented by HCAT Arlington was placed along a popular walking trail leading to a community center, and the second on a loop surrounding a public park.

To make the program accessible to children who cannot yet read or not yet fluent in English, HCAT Arlington chose books with short, simple text and engaging illustrations. The book selected for second StoryWalk™, Call Me Tree, ramped up the physical activity benefits: each page features a yoga pose that the children mirror as they read.

StoryWalks™, like the parks they are housed in, enrich the community in a number of ways. In addition to nurturing kids’ literacy, they give families an opportunity to get active together. HCAT Arlington intentionally placed their StoryWalks™ in parks near low-income housing communities, providing an easy, free, and accessible activity for the families living there.

Like LEAP, HCAT Arlington has been a VFHY grantee since July 2020, and we will support them through June 2024.

Inspired by these HCAT grantees’ innovative projects?

The next round of our childhood obesity prevention funding will open August 2025. Learn more here.