Healthy Rural Communities: Strategies and Models of Practice

This project has gone through several phases over several years:The initial phase led to the development of the Healthy Rural Communities Toolkit (funded by Public Health Ontario). The second phase (funded by the Guelph/OMAFRA Partnership) involved KTT with workshops delivered across the Province. The third phase (funded by Public Health Ontario and the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development) saw the development of educational materials, most recently culminating in a graduate course oriented to planning and public health students. Overall, this project aims to identify evidence-informed strategies and models of practice for land use planning policies, procedures and designs for the built environment to improve population health outcomes in rural communities. It has been identified that these communities often have limited resources and minimal development. This presentation will introduce a main output of this project— a toolkit which identifies rural land use policies that have successfully increased the capacity of the community to achieve positive health outcomes. This toolkit is produced to advise public health professionals, land use planners, municipal staff and elected officials of effective strategies and models of practice.  The presentation will also introduce educational materials developed in support of the graduate course:  Healthy Rural and Small-Town Communities. This includes many publicly available videos and other resource materials.