Community Trails and Mobile Equity Toolkit
Partner: The Trust for Public Lands (Denver)
Group Members: Hannah Larkin, Sophie Mangassarian, Casey McManus
The Trust for Public Land is nationally recognized for creating stronger and more resilient communities through the protection of land and the creation of parks. TPL uses research and innovation to determine priority projects that utilize community engagement to identify creative place-based solutions. Many challenges facing communities today are place-based, with zip codes steeped in historic and systemic inequalities. Previous transportation and planning initiatives have led to unsafe, congested, traffic and travel conditions in many under-resourced communities. The Community Trails capstone project will be working with communities experiencing these conditions along the urban Front Range to foster community-led trail development to create safer trail routes and increase mobile and transportation equity; ultimately strengthening and empowering communities. This project is visionary as it represents the first trail project developed by the only TPL Community Trails Program within the nation. The lessons learned from the capstone project will be distilled into a holistic toolkit. This toolkit will be publicly accessible on TPL’s Research Library website. It will be used by TPL and community advocates, to inform community-led trail development, for the purpose of addressing mobile equity issues within specific communities. The toolkit will incorporate TPL’s health initiatives and Climate Smart Cities™ program to address adverse environmental effects and promote healthier lifestyles within these communities. Using case studies from various community-led engagement projects, funding and budgeting information, as well as challenges and solutions encountered, the toolkit will work to inform and promote climate justice and mobile equity for future community-led TPL trail projects nationwide.