Resources

This page includes a selection of data collection, communication, outreach and organizational tools that we either use and love or have produced ourselves.

Background

Mass in Motion
Mass in Motion is a statewide movement that promotes opportunities for healthy eating and active living in the places people live, learn, work and play.

Healthy Eating

Be a Healthy Market: A Toolkit for Storeowners [PDF]
Healthy Hampshire published this toolkit to help storeowners who are interested in stocking or promoting healthier food options. The guide contains a number of resources and tip sheets to help with everything from no-cost strategies for promoting healthy products to facts about why it’s important to stock healthy products. This toolkit can also be useful for health department directors, local health inspectors, and other organizations interested in promoting access to healthy food choices in their communities.

Municipal Strategies to Increase Food Access: Volume 2 of the Healthy Community Design Toolkit [PDF]
This edition of the Healthy Community Design Toolkit—Leveraging Positive Change adds a focus on municipal strategies to facilitate food access in Massachusetts. Food access is increasingly being understood as playing a key role in people's health and well-being, especially for economically disadvantaged and otherwise marginalized families and individuals. Since 1994 when the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) worked with the Census Bureau to create measures of food security at the household level to gauge food accessibility, practitioners in both the public and private sectors from all levels of government including but not limited to planners, public health advocates, food banks, and community supported agriculture proponents have been working to improve health outcomes of economically disadvantaged people by improving food access.

Food Access Assessment

Healthy Hampshire Food Access Assessment Report [PDF]
Food Access Assessment Report Appendices [PDF: Methods and Tools]
Healthy Hampshire conducted a Food Access Assessment between 2016 and 2017 to inform Cooley Dickinson Health Care's community benefits strategies around food access. This report highlights the results of that assessment process. Also included here in a separate file are the report appendices, which contain the methodology and tools uses to conduct the assessment.

Food Access Action Plan Matrix [PDF]
As part of the Food Access Assessment process, we brought together a Food Access Advisory Committee made up of professionals and residents who were dealing with food insecurity over a period of five months to assess current conditions and propose an action plan to reduce barriers to food access in Hampshire County. The Food Access Advisory Committee produced the Food Access Action Plan Matrix, which helped craft the recommendations included in the Food Access Assessment Report.

Hampshire County Food Access Map
Hampshire County Food Access Map Report [PDF]
The Hampshire County Food Access Map is an online map produced by the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission [PVPC] as part of Healthy Hampshire's Food Access Assessment. It provides a visual representation of healthy food proximity for all points in Hampshire County and reveals areas of the county likely to have a high percent of households with food access challenges based on demographic factors. More information about how to interpret the map can be found in the accompanying PDF report, linked to above.

Amherst Food Justice Report and Action Plan [PDF]
In 2018, Healthy Hampshire partnered with the Center for Human Development’s Family Outreach of Amherst (FOA) to facilitate conversations about the concept and causes of food insecurity at FOA’s monthly community lunches, which brought together underserved residents to socialize and learn about resources and opportunities available to them. In order to bring Amherst practitioners who were working on aspects of food insecurity into the conversation with Amherst residents, Healthy Hampshire initiated an Amherst Food Justice Planning Process in 2019. This report describes the Amherst Food Justice Planning process and its outcomes.

SNAP Matching

How to apply for SNAP
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, helps low-income families stretch their food budget with a monthly cash allowance that can be spent on groceries. Think you might qualify but don't know where to get started? Click on the link above to find out how to apply for benefits.

Healthy Incentives Program [HIP]
Healthy Hampshire supports the statewide Healthy Incentives Program (HIP). HIP matches SNAP (formerly food stamps) purchases of local fruits and vegetables at farmers markets, farm stands, mobile markets, and community supported agriculture (CSA) farm share programs. SNAP households earn a dollar-for-dollar match on eligible purchases. The HIP benefit is immediately added to SNAP households’ EBT cards after each purchase. Households can earn up to $40, $60, or $80 per month depending on the number of people on their SNAP account. The link above contains informational resources in several different languages, as well as a searchable map of HIP eligible vendors.

HIP - Healthy Incentives Program, Pioneer Valley Facebook Page
The HIP Pioneer Valley Facebook page is regularly updated to spread the word about new HIP vendors, upcoming opportunities to earn the HIP benefit, recipes with HIP-eligible seasonal ingredients, and more! Like, follow, and share the page to stay updated and help us keep the public informed about HIP!

SNAP & Save Qualitative Data Summary [PDF]
Healthy Hampshire provided evaluation support for the SNAP & Save program, which provided a dollar-for-dollar match of up to $10 to SNAP (formerly food stamps) recipients at participating farmers markets, at farmers markets in Amherst, Northampton, and Belchertown from 2015 - 2016. Click on the link to read a summary of survey and interview results from participating markets in summer of 2015.

Active Living

WalkBoston
WalkBoston is a non-profit pedestrian advocacy organization dedicated to improving walking conditions in cities and towns across Massachusetts.

Community Use

Benefits of Community Use Infographic [PDF]
People everywhere want access to safe and affordable recreational spaces. With shared use, public and private property owners can open underutilized facilities for community use. Though often used as a strategy to increase opportunities for physical activity, shared use has many wide-ranging benefits.

The Massachusetts Community Use Toolkit [PDF]
Across the nation, communities are searching for ways to encourage their residents to live active and healthy lives. The term community use, also known as shared use or joint use, refers to the concept of opening local buildings and grounds at times when they are usually closed in order for residents to exercise and engage in other recreational activities. The Massachusetts Community Use Toolkit is a how-to guide for community members seeking to access public buildings and spaces afterhours, such as schools, playgrounds, town halls, and libraries.

Complete Streets

Massachusetts Department of Transportation's Complete Streets Program
The Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) offers training, guidance, and funding to municipalities to design and construct Complete Streets. Complete Streets are those that provide safe and accessible options for all travel modes--walking, biking, transit, and vehicles--for people of all ages and abilities.

Urban, Rural and Suburban Complete Streets Design Manual for the City of Northampton and Communities in Hampshire County [PDF]
This guide is intended for local planners, engineers and advocates to improve the walkability and bikability of roadways in their communities and create safer streets for users of all ages and abilities. The guide can be used to help communities identify appropriate Complete Streets design elements for a variety thoroughfares ranging from local roads in densely settled areas to state highways with high traffic volumes and speeds.

Small Town and Rural Multimodal Networks [PDF]
This document is intended to be a resource for transportation practitioners in small towns and rural communities. It applies existing national design guidelines in a rural setting and highlights small town and rural case studies. It addresses challenges specific to rural areas, recognizes how many rural roadways are operating today, and focuses on opportunities to make incremental improvements despite the geographic, fiscal, and other challenges that many rural communities face.

Northampton Complete Streets Ordinance [PDF]
The City of Northampton passed a Complete Streets Policy in 2015, making it the first Healthy Hampshire Community to set a goal of designing and operating streets to enable safe access for all users, including pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and transit riders of all ages and abilities.

Chester Complete Streets Policy [PDF]
The Town of Chester passed a Complete Streets Policy in 2016, providing a great local example to rural communities who want to improve oportunities for multi-modal transportation on their roads.

Complete Streets Technical Assistance Fact Sheet [PDF]
Are you a Healthy Hampshire member community interested in passing a Complete Streets policy? Check out this fact sheet to see what types of technical assistance you can get through Healthy Hampshire and contact Sarah Bankert to get started.

Complete Streets Demonstration Day, Northampton, MA [VIDEO]
Healthy Hampshire supported a Complete Streets Demonstration Day for the City of Northampton. During the demonstration, a temporary bike lane was added on Main Street, curb bump-outs were simulated at the crosswalk in front of City Hall, and Cracker Barrell Alley was closed off to cars and converted to a temporary park with tables and chairs. This video showcases some of the reactions to the project.

Assessment

East Hadley Road Neighborhood Survey Report [PDF]
Healthy Hampshire engaged a group of local youth to survey the East Hadley Road Neighborhood in Amherst. The goal of the survey was to find out how residents were accessing healthy food and what types of transportation they were using. Click on the link above for a summary of the survey results.

Amherst Fort River School Neighborhood Survey Report [PDF]
Healthy Hampshire engaged a group of local youth to survey the Fort River Neighborhood in Amherst. The goal of the survey was to find out about how residents were accessing healthy food, understand what types of transportation they were using, and to assess their interest in utilizing the nearby Fort River Farm for gardening. Click on the link above for a summary of the survey results.

Hilltown Health Assessment [PDF]
Healthy Hampshire conducted an assessment of 10 Hilltowns in Hampshire and Hampden Counties to identify policies and practices that:

Williamsburg Healthy Aging and Community Design [PDF]
Healthy Hampshire collaborated with the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission (PVPC), the Williamsburg Council on Aging, and WalkBoston on a project that examined how healthy aging in Williamsburg is affected by the Town's community design. This report details the findings and recommendations resulting from that project.

Williamsburg Town Facilities and Services Survey: Report to the Facilities Master Plan Committee [PDF]
During the summer of 2016, the town of Williamsburg created a Facilities Master Plan Committee to help support the town’s Board of Selectmen in their decisions about several major issues facing the town. The most significant of these were decisions about the location and style of a town safety complex and what to do with the site of the former Helen E. James School. However, the town is facing many other issues concerning its infrastructure, including tax/investment tradeoffs, issues related to how the town promotes healthy and active living, and the future of its senior center, and the Committee wanted a better understanding of residents’ priorities. Healthy Hampshire offered to design and analyze a survey that would provide information to the Committee as it makes its recommendations.

Walk Audits and Bicycle Assessments

Burgy Village Center Walk Audit, Williamsburg, MA [PDF]
WalkBoston conducted a walkability workshop on April 15, 2016, funded by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health Mass in Motion program. The workshop discussed the principles of walkable communities and summarized pedestrian infrastructure improvements that increase safety and improve the quality of the walking environment. After discussing walkability, WalkBoston staff led the group on a walk assessment of the Burgy town center. This report is a summary of the group’s observations and preliminary recommendations for improvements to the town center’s pedestrian infrastructure.

Route 202 “Common to Courthouse” Walk Audit Report [PDF]
On May 1, 2015, Healthy Hampshire organized a walk audit of the section of Route 202 that runs from the Belchertown town common to the Eastern Hampshire District Courthouse. Eighteen older adult volunteers participated, as well as the Planning Director Doug Albertson and Conservation Commissioner LeeAnne Connelly. This report summarizes the data collected through the audit, as well as the observations shared during the discussion.

Stop and Shop and Crystal Springs Plaza Walk Audit Report [PDF]
On June 24, 2015, Healthy Hampshire organized a walk audit of two intersections in the area around the Stop and Shop grocery store in Belchertown, MA, all of which are MassDOT roads. This report summarizes the data collected through the audit, as well as the observations shared during the discussion.

Belchertown Route 202 Bikeability Assessment [PDF]
Healthy Hampshire organized a bikeability assessment of Route 202 in Belchertown led by Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition (MassBike). The purpose of the bikeability assessment was to build local knowledge and capacity to improve bicyclist safety, to provide guidance for potential specific projects, policies, and programs, and to identify opportunities for further study. This bikeability assessment report summarizes the observations made in the selected study area.