Jeremy Hoffman from Groundwork USA on Richmond's Path to Becoming America's Healthiest City by 2033

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The scars of those decisions still play out in the present day in a variety of different ways, including in other, you know, non-environmental things Asthma rates, which is related to the social determinants of health and that proximity to traffic there are.
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You know, largearon Chavis, another kind of visionary person from here in Richmond, helped me see the relationships between this heat island effect and a variety of other inequities in the city.
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One, two, three.
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You're listening to America's Healthiest City on Mike King Biz Radio Network on ESPN.
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Richmond 106.1 and Choice 105.3.
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Good morning and welcome to America's Healthiest City.
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On ESPN Richmond 106.1, part of the Mike King Biz Media Network, I'm your host, will Melton, and if you're tuning in for the very first time, please visit americashealthiestcitycom to learn about our 10-year community partnership to make all of Richmond the healthiest in America by 2033.
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There are a lot of ideas on our ideas board.
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You can check out what it's going to take for us to get there, but the number one key is that we're all working together in the same direction at the same time.
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It's impossible if we don't.
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Today in the studio I have Jeremy Hoffman, phd.
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He is the Director of Climate Justice and Impact at Groundwork USA.
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He has made a tremendous mark on the Richmond community through his work in academia and through the Science Museum, so I'm super excited about this conversation.
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I've been trying to nail you down for quite a while.
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I cannot remember now who it was that referred you, but I'm sure now by now it's been a couple of folks.
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So welcome to the show.
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Thank you so much.
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Yeah, it's great to finally be able to get here into the studio with you.
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So I'm looking forward to this conversation.
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Yeah well, you have, as I mentioned, you've done a lot here in the community and you've been an educator for a long time.
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You were a student for a long time to be able to get there, but you've also been doing a lot of work.
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So I want to start out with the same question that we ask everybody Are you native to Richmond or did you move here, and, if so, what brought you?
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I am an adopted son of Richmond now.
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I grew up in Iowa.
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I was born in Chicago, moved to Iowa when I was 10 years old, then stayed in the Midwest through my undergraduate degree at Augustana College in Rock Island, illinois, got really fascinated in climate research in college, then moved to Corvallis, oregon, to do my PhD at Oregon State.
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While I was at Oregon State I learned about how passionate I was for sharing my knowledge and trying to kind of inspire people to see the world differently through science, especially environmental science, and it was there that I learned about this kind of crazy career path you can take to go to a science museum and design learning experiences for people, experiences for people.
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And so I took a chance on a small but mighty science museum in Richmond, virginia, and moved here, pretty much without ever visiting before, in September of 2016.
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So we're nearing a decade of living here in Richmond and serving the community in a variety of different capacities.
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You've got me beat by a little bit less than a year.
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I moved here in 2017.
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In the CNN video that was shot saying that Richmond is the best city to visit in America, Hamilton Glass said that Richmond is a place where creators come to make things happen.
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What about Richmond made you stay after you moved here and found out what it was all about?
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The thing that really set Richmond's environmental world apart, I think in some ways, because, you know, at that time in 2016, a lot of communities were finally starting to really grapple with what local climate action looked like.
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You know we were coming up on, you know, decades of research with very little progress at the federal, international level.
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You know the national, international level.
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So there was this swing towards very highly localized climate adaptation and mitigation planning.
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And so at that time when I moved here, the city elected LeVar Stoney, who took it on his administration to start the RVA Green 2050 planning process, which was originally just a greenhouse gas mitigation plant and it was very ambitious even for that time.
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But simultaneously, there are all these environmental nonprofits that were doing really amazing work in things like green infrastructure, parks, access, tree planting, groups like Groundwork RVA, which led to my job at Groundwork USA in the last year and a half, and so it was the this amalgamation of very highly impactful organizations that were all working to improve the environmental quality of Richmond's neighborhoods that I started to kind of link together through projects starting in 2017.
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And then, you know, kind of rolling like a snowball after our initial heat mapping campaign in 2017.
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So the success of that project and bringing together these organizations that are built by and for the people of Richmond and continue to make huge impacts and progress at that local level is really what has kept me here and will continue to keep me here for, you know, as long as, as long as they'll have me.
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So I happen to know a little bit about this space.
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My firm is fortunate to be redesigning the website for Groundwork RBA, and I had the opportunity to be a student with Rob, the executive director there, through Leadership Metro Richmond in 2020.
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And we were privy to the heat mapping project then and it's part of the learning that goes on in Quest to this day For our listeners.
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Can you talk a little bit about the heat mapping project and what did you guys learn?
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What resource was created as a result of that project and how is that impacting communities today?
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Yeah, so I start any conversation about this with really just kind of like something that we can all relate to.
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You know, whether we get off the bus or get off our bike or get out of our car in the middle of the summer in a totally empty parking lot, you know, just think of it like going to Target or some you know some store that has this like massive parking lot and that uncomfortable feeling of you know this is like walking around outside and someone else's mouth.
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You know that really like hot, humid air is one experience.
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And then on the flip side of that, you know imagine getting off the bus or off your bike or out of your car and walking into one of Richmond's you know world-class parks and it's super shady, and you get that relief from the you know really powerful heat here in the Southeast.
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That kind of juxtaposition between those two extremes is really what defines what we call the urban heat island effect, where human landscapes, where we've built up things like parking lots, buildings made out of very dark hard surfaces, those sorts of things actually absorb more of the sun's energy throughout the day and then re-emit it back into the air in the afternoon and into the evening and what that does is to artificially well, not really even artificially really lift the air temperature in those places several degrees higher than what it would be just a few blocks away in a city park.
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Now, that has been around for over 100 years.
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We've actually, you know, known about the urban heat island effect for a really long time, but what we didn't know a lot about was how, by how much does air temperature vary within the same small space, like a city like Richmond, which is relatively small in area?
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How much does temperature vary in the hottest time of the year?
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And so, collaborating with my colleague, vivek Shandas at Portland State University, who had put together the kind of technology side of things you know how to put a really reliable thermometer on a car, on a bike, along with the GPS unit which is keeping track of where you are in space really accurately he kind of come up with a method by which you dispatch people in cars during a heat wave or on bikes riding around during a heat wave to measure the city's temperature, and they've never really done that uh, very much uh, in other places.
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So we set out in july of 2017 to do it here in the southeast for the first time, and the thing that we did differently here in richmond was to build that kind of coalition of uh, community organizations that would actually make up our volunteer team.
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So the kind of technique is called community science.
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Basically, what we did was dispatch these volunteers all over the city.
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We found a 16 degree Fahrenheit difference between two places at the exact same time during a heat wave, two places at the exact same time during a heat wave.
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So the numbers that we found was like somebody in Scott's edition or in Manchester would be experiencing 103 degrees Fahrenheit when someone in the fourth district, kind of Southwestern Richmond, or in one of the really shady parks, is feeling 87 degrees Fahrenheit.
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I mean that's a huge difference.
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And so I think the fact that not only we had so many people involved, we had youth and students from university and adults, we had, you know, we had a whole really cool group of people going around doing this, but then on top of that we had an exact number to tell people, like no kidding, this is what this is, how extreme it can get.
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That map has now been used in dozens of different things over the years, from reports for the state of housing quality in particular neighborhoods, to health reports.
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We've published a bunch of papers on the health burden of extreme heat.
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Other groups you know it's found its way into the Richmond 300 Comprehensive Master Plan.
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Other groups you know it's found its way into the Richmond 300 Comprehensive Master Plan.
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It serves as one of the main, you know, data sets for tracking the progress on RVA Green 2050.
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And it's been integrated into a variety of different school curricula, either at the elementary school, middle school, high school, and I teach it along with several of my colleagues at University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University.
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So it's yeah, it's kind of weird.
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Rob Jones is actually someone that says, like you know, 10 years ago nobody knew about this thing the urban heat island effect and it was Richmond that did it.
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You know, and I think in many ways a lot of people do think of Richmond as where this work really took off not necessarily began, but certainly picked up a lot of steam.
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I want to talk more about the impacts and implications of that.
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Thank you for listening to America's Healthiest City on Mike King Biz Radio Network.
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When we asked ourselves what could we do to stop the tide of plastic bottled water.
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Now we're replacing single-use plastic on the shelf with collectible, refillable aluminum bottles of water and we're installing refill stations throughout RVA, launching a a movement to refill.
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It's your turn to make a splash.
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Find your bottle of richmond water or add refill stations to your next event at drinkrichmondwatercom.
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That's kind of cool welcome back to america's healthiest city.
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On espn richmond 106.1 fm, you can catch us each week on Thursdays at 6 am.
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Catch us here on the network, on ESPNRichmondcom, on YouTube, linkedin and wherever you get your podcasts.
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We're live at 6 am every Thursday.
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We're in the studio today with Jeremy Hoffman, the Director of Climate Justice and Impact at Groundwork USA.
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Justice and impact at Groundwork USA.
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We were just talking about the urban heat island effect and the map that Groundwork USA worked to put together to map the geographical lines of these impacts.
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One of the things that I know that came out of this is that there's an outsized impact, negative impact, on neighborhoods that were historically red lines way back when, and we know that, as you were mentioning, that there are real health implications.
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So when we talk about equity, talk about equality, this is something that's really important and I don't think we can talk enough about it.
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So do you have, you know, any kind of takeaways that people can think about, or you know, perhaps some bridges to help people think about this idea?
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Yeah.
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So you know, going back to the example of the parking lot versus the park, even if you just look at a visual map, go on Google Maps and kind of zoom out on Richmond and you can see the places where we have really mostly built up surfaces.
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You can see the parking lots, you can see the lack of trees.
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It turns out that the history of our city and cities all over the country kind of determined that almost 100 years ago.
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So there were decisions that were made by a few people that have affected many through the generations and it echoes today as inequitable distributions of extreme heat.
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So while it's not the only example of this practice, most of the real estate and urban planning world in the 20th century was defined by looking at communities of color as less than as something that was hazardous, that even proximity to neighborhoods of color was seen as a detrimental influence on your neighborhood.
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That largely then set off a sequence of additional policies and plans in the decades subsequent that further concentrated these sorts of built-up surfaces.
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Things like the interstate system was run through formerly redlined neighborhoods.
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Here in Richmond, i-64 and 95 cut straight through Jackson Ward and what are we doing now?
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We're talking about a park to cap the overpass right.
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So the scars of those decisions still play out in the present day in a variety of different ways, including in other non-environmental things Asthma rates, which is related to the social determinants of health, and that proximity to traffic there are large disparities in food access.
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Disparities in food access, you know, daron Chavis, another kind of visionary person from here in Richmond, helped me see the relationships between this heat island effect and a variety of other.
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You know inequities in the city and so when you look at the redlining map here and around the country, you can pretty much be certain that those neighborhoods that receive red lines are also hotter during the summer, have higher rates of heat-related illness, higher rates of asthma, higher rates of cancer, higher rates of obesity.
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You know, less homeownership, lower credit scores.
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It is quite literally such a fundamental treatment to these places that was almost a century ago playing out in the present day, and heat is just one way that we were able to kind of begin the conversation around not only environmental inequity.
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But then what does that mean from the lens of other sustainability kinds of positions, like transit or walkability or food access?
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So really, the heat, the heat island study I didn't know at the time was going to turn into a uh a, a extremely useful framing by which to introduce a lot of other kind of social justice and racial justice issues within the lens of climate change justice, and so it's been.
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It's been really amazing to see how, not only here in Richmond, it's been used to advance equitable outcomes, but in you know, people have used our method to map heat in over 75 communities nationwide now and advance things like urban canopy plans and transit improvements.
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I mean it's really, really amazing to have had a hand in helping to guide that along amazing to have had a hand in helping to guide that along.
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I can only imagine that perhaps there's a silver lining to gentrification, where you know people of means, people who know you know that the lived environment is going to impact them.
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You know, I used to live in the north side and every entrance to my neighborhood had a McDonald's in it.
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You know, now I live right next to 6495.
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It's literally at my condo level and I think about these impacts and I'm not immune to them because that's where I live, and so we're all dealing with these problems and we all stand to benefit if we work to solve them.
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So let's talk about solutions.
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Talk a little bit about your work at Groundwork USA.
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What are you doing now to impact this and how do you see, you know, maybe the next 10 years of your life unfolding so that you can do the work that you're doing in a way that's gratifying and impactful?
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The portfolio of work that Groundwork USA and the trusts as we, you know, as they're referred to in our network do is so varied and wonderful.
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It's hard to grasp, you know, in a short amount of time.
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But I encourage any listeners or people you know listening in to go to groundworkusaorg, check out our State of the Network report, which you can find on the internet through our website, and learn about the variety of different things going on, because I mean it's staggering the amount of kind of community engaged, participatory work that's going on.
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But to try and encapsulate it in a few words is really we're kind of rooted in youth empowerment and youth development.
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So a lot of our programs are focused on what is known as the green team and green teams are assembled, they're paid kind of internships for young people in these cities.
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The Groundwork Network operates in 21 cities currently around the country and the Green Team is almost one of the most constant programs among those locations and so youth get involved in things like neighborhood cleanups, building stormwater infrastructure, like green infrastructure and things like that, like green infrastructure and things like that, learning about food access and land justice and, you know, doing engagement with elderly residents to build and use air purifiers for high particulate pollution days like during wildfire events.
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And then we have at the same time a really great program for kind of adult residents of neighborhoods, particularly ones that have been redlined, called our Climate Safe Neighborhoods Program, and in many ways some of the early work that we were doing here in Richmond helped inform what that program became at Groundwork USA.
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We called it throwing shade in RVA back then, but it was basically, you know, unpacking the history of place with the folks that live there.
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Like your neighborhood doesn't look like this by accident.
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The decisions that were made without you involved have made your city and your neighborhood hotter than others.
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You have fewer trees than others, you have more flooding than others because of these decisions.
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So let's get in on that information.
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Then the second step is to really show what sort of strategies for implementation would be, from planting a small urban garden, doing some sort of tree planting program, doing a pocket park which we've done several around here in Richmond and then really doing this kind of systems intervention stuff, so actually building the capacity of residents to participate in the civic system that has marginalized their neighborhood through inequitable distribution of resources and things like city budgets.
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So it's really this multi-year investment in transforming a small group of residents to take on the role of urban planning for their own neighborhood, so that their voice and vision is what is coming through in the big plans that then get passed that will define what their neighborhood looks like for the next 20 or 30 years.
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So Grand Park RVA has been super involved in things like the Richmond 300 plan and the RVA Green 2050 plan, and now is part of you know, huge multi-million dollar grants for the city of Richmond to do things like urban and community forestry.
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That's just one example of the kinds of programs that we do around the country, and it's truly every single day.
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I get inspired by some new thing that I hear about.
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You know, some elderly resident from a you know public housing community putting a air quality monitor in their house and choosing to turn on an air purifier for the first time because they have now been informed by the data that our organization is able to provide for them.
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It's really amazing.
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Wow, there's a lot of angles that we could go down here.
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I think we'll take a quick break and when we come back we'll talk a little bit more about Richmond specifically and what our future looks like, and maybe share some ideas about ways that folks can get involved here in this community.
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Thank you for listening to America's Healthiest City on Mike King Biz Radio Network.
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Good morning and welcome back to America's Healthiest City on ESPN.
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I'm your host, will Melton.
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If you're new to this program, please check out americashealthiestcitycom.
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We are inviting folks who represent businesses, nonprofits, institutions, academic institutions and government institutions to see what it takes to become an ambassador.
00:21:45.553 --> 00:21:46.957
We invite you to participate.
00:21:46.957 --> 00:21:52.211
It doesn't cost a thing and there are lots of ways that we can share your stories and ways that you're making an impact in our community.
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Today in the studio I have Jeremy Hoffman.
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He works for Groundwork USA, he's the Director of Climate Justice and Impact and we're having a great conversation about all the learnings really over the last several years that are starting to pan out in projects and developments and things that are going to make our community healthier.
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I think a lot about the social determinants.
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We don't talk a lot about fitness and what we eat on this show.
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Obviously, those things really matter, but, as you mentioned, the decisions that have taken place over a really long period of time ultimately make a lot of the decisions for our lived experience every day.
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I'm a big believer that the solutions that we introduced today shouldn't just be in response to things, but we can design them to solve multiple problems when we roll them out.
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So I'm curious what are some ideas that you might inject on our ideas board that are ways that folks can get involved, whether it be small or maybe something more monumental that starts to move us in this direction or helps move us in that direction?
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One of my most amazing facts that I say at dinner parties know, I don't think I go to dinner parties anymore, but when I talk to people at the bus stop or, you know, in my classes at vcu or u of r?
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Um is that there's more.
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There's more land dedicated to paved surfaces than there are parks in the city of richmond.
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There's more land that's paved over than there is for parks in the city, and that is even.
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We have some of the world's best parks we in.
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I mean, it's amazing the James River Park system, for example absolute, you know, economy driver here for ecotourism and things like that but huge swaths of our community are without easy access to a park.
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And so in 2020, in response to some of the work that we had done on the urban heat island effect and so on, the Stoney administration one of the probably lasting legacies of their administration is going to be dedicating five new parcels of city surplus land as new parks for the Parks Recreation Community Facilities Department, and so right now there is visioning going on for what those parks look like through the Richmond Parks Inspire report or survey, so your listeners can participate in that.
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Speak what you would like to see into reality.
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Through the Parks and Recreation Department Also, there are opportunities to engage in visioning around some of these park spaces.
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So the Broad Rock Community Park is one such space and then the Ernst Road location.
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I forget the exact location addresses, but through Parks and Recreation they have been partnering with Groundwork, rva, with Southside Relief, which is another organization we haven't said yet on air, but also Virginia Community Voice, which is another Southside-specific engagement and community-based organization.
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They're all being engaged with the residents around these parks to kind of guide what the programming looks like.
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You know, what are the trails, what are the amenities, what are the things that your community wants in these spaces?
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Because it's the first time these areas have had a new park since the 70s time.
00:25:23.289 --> 00:25:32.896
These areas have had a new park since the 70s, so this is a truly monumental time in Richmond's park and green space history that everyone can get involved in to help shape what it looks like now and into the future.
00:25:32.896 --> 00:25:44.778
So investing in time in our green spaces will ultimately make our communities much more climate resilient through providing those sorts of green cool spaces.
00:25:44.778 --> 00:26:00.683
They soak up rainwater, they protect us from flooding, but they also provide opportunities for people to get outside, breathe fresh air, exercise and, you know, if there are things like food, forests and urban gardens incorporated, you get fresh food as an added benefit.
00:26:00.683 --> 00:26:12.195
So, truly, I think parks and green space are by far the most revolutionary thing that we could be doing in Richmond to secure the health and well-being of our residents now and into the future.
00:26:12.650 --> 00:26:14.176
I just want a Ferris wheel on Mayo Island.
00:26:14.176 --> 00:26:15.576
That's all I'm asking for.
00:26:17.510 --> 00:26:19.878
It's going to be amazing to see what happens with all that.
00:26:19.878 --> 00:26:21.015
But a Ferris wheel, you know we don't.
00:26:21.015 --> 00:26:23.979
We don't see that many Ferris wheels locally, so who knows?
00:26:23.979 --> 00:26:25.848
But see, put it in the report, yeah.
00:26:26.290 --> 00:26:29.436
I submitted it on social media, so we'll see if I can drag it over there.
00:26:29.436 --> 00:26:46.718
Something else that we look for from our guests is recommendations for other people in the community that are making a difference, and you're going to be hard pressed to name somebody that is has not been on the show, cause everybody you've named so far today, uh, has been, except, you know we didn't get Southside relief yet, or Virginia community voice.
00:26:46.718 --> 00:26:49.853
But you know, maybe an individual or who, who should we talk to?
00:26:49.853 --> 00:26:53.330
Who you think is going to, um, help us usher in this reality?
00:26:54.372 --> 00:27:08.142
And I think that there are some really amazing, thoughtful folks that are being hired into the city's government right now Young, forward-thinking people from other places.
00:27:08.142 --> 00:27:16.548
You know, like you and I are not you know Richmond native and I think that that kind of outside perspective is really helpful.
00:27:16.548 --> 00:27:26.213
You know the Parks and Recreation Director, chris Vrelke, for example.
00:27:26.213 --> 00:27:35.038
He moved here from North Carolina and look at all of the great things going on in the park system, from partnerships with a Richmond Connects program to new community centers with really important community engagement, to this Inspire program.
00:27:35.038 --> 00:27:41.721
I mean, that's a person that has truly had a really outsized imprint on the city in a very short amount of time.
00:27:41.721 --> 00:27:47.242
There are examples of those sorts of people all over the departments in the city government.
00:27:49.771 --> 00:28:02.913
Laura Thomas in the Office of Sustainability has been leading the RVA Green 2050 plan from within and really transforming the way that the city does things like grant opportunities.
00:28:03.034 --> 00:28:09.855
The small resilience plan program has been giving out ARPA money, but then that's also now been renewed.
00:28:09.855 --> 00:28:22.203
And people you know just up and down Andy in the DPW who does the traffic engineering and Vision Zero program.
00:28:22.203 --> 00:28:25.961
I think it's it's truly like giving giving what we know.
00:28:25.961 --> 00:28:36.699
I admire your, your program here, because you have highlighted so many great community voices it's like also there's the community voice of the the people that work in the city are super important too.
00:28:36.699 --> 00:29:02.362
So I think that those folks, all these new, really engaging folks at the city Ryan Wren would be another person who used to run storefront for Metro Richmond Just a truly like, thoughtful and kind human, and there are so many people up and down the departments now that I think giving them an opportunity to share a little bit about what they're excited about, alongside the partnerships that they have with the people that have been on your show.
00:29:02.362 --> 00:29:10.894
We're really fortunate to live in Richmond at this time and I'm really excited to see what happens in the next, over the next 10 years.
00:29:10.894 --> 00:29:11.979
It's going to be really amazing.
00:29:12.750 --> 00:29:13.895
Well, how could folks get in touch with you?
00:29:13.895 --> 00:29:15.713
I'm super.
00:29:15.773 --> 00:29:24.103
I'm super easy to find on social media, super involved still on LinkedIn and on X, which was Twitter.
00:29:24.103 --> 00:29:31.900
You can also reach out to me through Groundwork USA and I teach at the University of Richmond and VCU.
00:29:31.900 --> 00:29:34.778
So come and audit one of my classes.
00:29:34.778 --> 00:29:38.773
You can, night class learn a little bit.
00:29:38.773 --> 00:29:50.386
And then through my partnerships with Southside Relief, groundwork, rva and Happily Natural Day, when I'm available you can kind of find me in a variety of different places around the city.
00:29:50.910 --> 00:29:53.239
Well, Jeremy Hoffman, thank you for joining us today in the studio.
00:29:53.239 --> 00:29:54.910
Very much enjoyed this conversation.
00:29:54.910 --> 00:29:57.499
We could spend another hour talking about all these topics.
00:29:57.499 --> 00:30:05.042
We could spend another hour talking about all these topics, but I think your insights today are going to help our audience believe in this mission and maybe get involved a little bit more than they already are.
00:30:05.210 --> 00:30:06.655
Well, thank you so much for the invitation.
00:30:06.655 --> 00:30:07.157
It's been great.
00:30:07.950 --> 00:30:09.696
This was America's Healthiest City on ESPN.
00:30:09.696 --> 00:30:14.914
If you're just tuning in, please hop over to americashealthiestcitycom and subscribe to our podcast.
00:30:14.914 --> 00:30:18.756
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00:30:18.756 --> 00:30:24.244
It'll help us get in front of more listeners here in Richmond and catch us each week here on the network at 6 am.
00:30:24.244 --> 00:30:28.836
We'll catch you next week.