Things have changed since 2019, for everyone. We have a shared experience of a time in which almost everyone spent prolonged periods at home, not going to our usual places of work and unable to take part in any of our normal social/leisure activities.
Shared experiences can be unifying. Going through something that everyone can relate to can lay the foundations for a collective realisation that may have been previously known only to a smaller group.
You may wonder where this is going. Well, it’s my sincere belief that this is what happened with physical activity. Prior to 2019, there had always been a proportion of society who believed that being active in some way is a fundamental part of experiencing a happy and healthy life, but that certainly wasn’t universal.
I’m not saying that everyone is now an evangelist for sport and physical activity, far from it. I do, however, believe that everyone has at least experienced first-hand how being active in some way is a necessary part of living well. Those of us who were able went for walks, rode bikes, and visited parks and open spaces. Sometimes we did it to get away from everyone in the house, sometimes we did it to experience something enjoyable with the people around us. But we knew we needed to do it.
We recognise, implicitly, that green spaces are vital parts of community infrastructure, providing a necessary service which enriches our lives.
Fast-forward to late 2024 and we now carry that lived experience with us, so we’re all a little more knowledgeable about the important role that our parks and open spaces play - particularly for those communities who do not have access to a huge range of options to be active when money and time is tight.
If resources are tight for our communities, the same can be said for local authorities, too - the organisations who (in most cases) maintain our community green spaces. Funding is so stretched across the public sector that many local authorities struggle to maintain their statutory obligations (services like social care for children and older people).
In these difficult times, the argument to maintain the funding that sustains non-statutory provisions like parks is that through their removal, you would inevitably increase the eventual burden placed upon those statutory services, like social care and the NHS - meaning their removal is a short-term saving which would result in higher costs in the medium-long-term.
So, if we are to maintain infrastructure and services which contribute toward maintaining and improving public health, then perhaps we should take a broader look at what resources exist across ‘the system’ to deliver against those objectives.
One such organisation taking this progressive approach to resourcing the operations of community green spaces is Birmingham City Council. The Council is utilising investment from Public Health to resource its ranger team. The case made for this investment is that through the maintenance and provision of high-quality urban and community green spaces, health inequalities can be reduced.
Those spaces are free, accessible infrastructure, providing the literal platform for a range of self-directed and community-organised activities.
If we are sincere in our belief that these spaces are so important, then it’s equally important that we do what we can to prove their worth and maximise the impact on those communities who benefit most through their existence.
This is the foundation of our new partnership with Birmingham City Council.
We will be providing ongoing insights, using our progressive Movement Data service, to establish past and ongoing usage of all 591 green spaces across the City, as well as helping the Council to understand the socio-economic and demographic profile of the current users of those spaces.
The Authority will then be able to better quantify and evidence the impact of their parks. This will also deepen the Council’s understanding of which sites connect most successfully with their communities and will be able to monitor the ongoing impact of efforts to increase engagement with priority communities.
The benefits of this approach will make possible the continuation of public health investment, as well as providing a strong evidence base for capital grant applications, enhanced partnership working, and increased awareness at a senior officer level as well as with elected officials.
We see a growing use of our Movement Data service, to help prove the health impacts of our open spaces, and will focus efforts in the coming period to aggregate this insight at a national level, enabling the provision of benchmarking, and even moving into harnessing the power of AI and machine learning to forecast and recommend potential changes/improvements.
What is clear is that movement data is quickly becoming the integral component which makes possible the connection between health and the natural environment.
Ben Jones, ActiveXchange
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