Healthy Communities: An Interactive Policy Vision

Although public policy is a powerful tool for social change in public health, it is often difficult to illustrate the many benefits public policy change can provide to a community. To help our wide range of audiences—from community members and advocates to policymakers—Public Health Law & Policy is developing an interactive graphic tool, available through our website, to help show how extensively public policy can strengthen the health of a community.

The online tool will invite users to select a particular building or feature of the community—a crosswalk, community garden, school playground, or fast food restaurant, for example—and see what related policy tools are available to the user. This interactive graphic will allow a variety of audience members with different levels of policy sophistication to easily find tools to build a healthier community in which to live and work.

The interactive graphic will have a similar functionality to a Google map: users will be able to zoom in on and pan around the community-scape, and related results (i.e. factsheets, model ordinances, checklists and toolkits) will appear in a clickable list in the left sidebar on the page. The tool takes the abstract vision of a community supported by healthy policy and makes it tangible, concrete, and available at any time to any user with an Internet connection.