Strategies

Offer group educational, social, creative, musical, or physical activities that promote social interactions, regular attendance, and community involvement among older adults

Provide education, information, counseling, and support for breastfeeding to women throughout pre- and post-natal care

Establish partnerships between farmers and consumers in which consumers purchase a share of a farm’s products in advance

Build, strengthen, and maintain social networks that provide supportive relationships for behavior change through walking groups or other community-based interventions

Enhance streetscapes with greater sidewalk coverage and walkway connectivity, street crossing safety features, traffic calming measures, and other design elements

Provide patients with prescriptions for exercise plans, often accompanied by progress checks at office visits, counseling, activity logs, and exercise testing

Implement systems that help health professionals support patient tobacco cessation, often with referrals, self-help pamphlets, and pharmacotherapy

Train volunteers, professionals, or paraprofessionals to help residents assess and reduce environmental home health risks and recommend low cost changes (e.g., improved ventilation, integrated pest management, etc.)

Increase healthy options in vending machines by reducing the price of healthy choices, increasing the number of healthy choices compared to unhealthy choices, etc.

Provide pregnant and parenting teens with services such as education, vocational training, case management, health care, child care, and transportation assistance to support high school completion

Provide grants to states and localities to fund activities that build, buy, or rehabilitate affordable housing for rent or homeownership, or provide direct rental assistance to households with low incomes

Provide rapid access to permanent housing and support (e.g., crisis intervention, needs assessment, case management), usually for chronically homeless individuals with persistent mental illness or substance abuse issues

Provide funding, primarily to families with low or middle incomes, to repair, improve, or modernize dwellings and remove health or safety hazards

Apologize for discriminatory housing policies; increase subsidies, financing, and paths to homeownership for people of color; and invest in systematically disadvantaged neighborhoods

Support funds that help create or maintain affordable housing, subsidize rental housing, and assist homebuyers with low incomes and non-profit housing developers

Teach behavioral skills that can help individuals incorporate physical activity into their daily routines

Clean, remove, replace, or cover lead contaminated soil with non-contaminated soil, mulch, sod, grass, or concrete

Eliminate lead-based paint and contaminated dust by removing or encapsulating lead paint, or removing lead painted fixtures and surfaces

Replace lead plumbing material such as pipes, service lines, fittings, solder, flux, and fixtures with non-lead plumbing material

Provide funds to households with low incomes to meet home energy needs, especially for households with children, older adults, or individuals with disabilities

Support a combination of land uses (e.g., residential, commercial, recreational) in development initiatives, often through zoning regulations or Smart Growth initiatives

Combine educational, environmental, and behavioral activities that increase physical activity and improve nutrition (e.g., nutrition education, aerobic/strength training, dietary prescriptions, etc.) in various settings

Provide prescriptions with healthy eating goals for patients and families, often accompanied by progress checks at office visits; can include partnerships with local farmers markets via FVRx programs

Allow community members to gather, socialize, walk, run, bike, skate, etc. on streets temporarily to closed to motorized traffic; also called Ciclovía programs

Modify local environments to support physical activity, increase access to new or existing facilities for physical activity, or build new facilities

Place motivational signs on or near stairwells, elevators, and escalators that encourage individuals to use stairs

Establish programs that accept expired, unwanted, or unused medicines from designated users and dispose of them responsibly

Introduce or expand transportation options that are available to the public and run on a scheduled timetable (e.g., buses, trains, ferries, rapid transit, etc.)

Partner with doctors, nurse practitioners, and other medical professionals to incorporate literacy support into regular well-child visits, especially in lower income communities

Establish transportation services for areas with low population densities using publicly funded buses and vans on a set schedule, dial-a-ride transit, volunteer ridesharing, etc.

Promote walking and biking to school through education, incentives, and environmental changes; often called SRTS

Provide health care services on school premises to attending elementary, middle, and high school students; physical and mental health services provided by teams of nurses, nurse practitioners, and physicians

Use counseling, informational materials, etc. to inform smokers and non-smokers of the harms of secondhand smoke and encourage them to implement home smoking bans

Create designated tax districts that generate revenue to invest in affordable housing initiatives, blight remediation, and economic development efforts

Reduce patients’ out-of-pocket costs for tobacco cessation therapies such as nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) and cessation counseling participation

Set the number, type, proximity, and density of tobacco retailers, especially near homes and schools, via state or local zoning, licensing restrictions, or other regulations

Modify the built environment to affect traffic speed and patterns via speed humps, pedestrian center crossing islands, roundabouts, etc.

Support food-producing and income-earning activities in urban environments (e.g., edible landscapes, front yard or rooftop gardens, window farming, hydroponics, livestock, etc.)

Make water readily available in various settings via regular placement of drinking fountains, water coolers, bottled water in vending machines, etc.

Provide assistance to families with low incomes to make their homes more energy efficient and to permanently reduce their energy bills

Use educational, environmental, and behavioral strategies to improve food choices and physical activity opportunities in worksite settings, also called workplace health programs

Reform zoning regulations to remove exclusionary zoning codes, address physical environment aesthetics and safety, street continuity and connectivity, residential density, and mixed-use development, etc.

Allow residents to keep chickens and bees within city or municipality limits

Limit or ban fast food outlets in areas of a city, restrict the number or density of outlets, or regulate distance between fast food outlets and other sites (e.g., schools)