East Brainerd neighborhoods tackling social wellness through new initiative

Lantz Powell, right, shares his desire to build community through wellness during the launch of Chattanooga's Healthier Tennessee Neighborhoods program Oct. 25. (Contributed photo)
Lantz Powell, right, shares his desire to build community through wellness during the launch of Chattanooga's Healthier Tennessee Neighborhoods program Oct. 25. (Contributed photo)

Six local communities are taking steps to improve the health of residents following the launch of Chattanooga's Healthier Tennessee Neighborhoods program last week.

A product of the Governor's Foundation for Health and Wellness, the statewide program seeks to increase physical activity and encourage healthier eating and tobacco abstinence at the neighborhood level through citizen-lead efforts.

"Too often, we have so many wonderful projects that happen in our communities but many times they fail because they're not about the people," said District 5 Hamilton County Commissioner Katherlyn Geter. "The people are not at the table, the people are not behind them, the people are not at the center of them. But this [initiative] could work because it is driven by the people it's meant to help."

Representatives from Chattanooga's six pilot neighborhoods mentioned a variety of motivations for getting their communities involved, such as a desire to help elderly residents remain active, interest in showing the younger generation the benefits of outdoor play, and the need for healthier options in communities within a food desert.

Lantz Powell, who is spearheading the effort in East Brainerd's Belleau Woods neighborhood, said he sees the initiative as an opportunity to foster healthy social interaction, in addition to healthy bodies, which he believes is a vital need, especially for his 260-home neighborhood.

"Because we don't have front porches, people go watch television, they sit on the back deck and have a drink and then they go to bed," Powell said, comparing the dynamic to nearby neighborhoods like Reunion, whose porches, he believes, encourage passing neighbors to spend more time outdoors interacting with one another.

Powell said he hopes to use the push to bring community members together in a way that more divisive issues, such as politics or religion, might not.

"Health is right down the middle," he said. "Everybody can agree on it. It's universal."

Powell has started working toward his goal by organizing group walks for neighborhood residents, and Danny Pflug, president of the Belleau Woods Homeowners Association, said the results so far have been promising.

Since he and his neighbors began taking more walks as part of the health effort, Pflug said he has had a chance to befriend several people living nearby whom he might not have met otherwise, including a few who moved to Chattanooga from countries such as India and Cambodia.

In an effort to foster that "community gathering mentality," District 4 City Councilman Darrin Ledford, who lives in the Reunion neighborhood, said he has been working on a separate imitative to keep developments like strip malls from being placed along the recently widened section of East Brainerd Road that runs from Graysville to Morris Hill roads.

He pointed to a coffeehouse planned for McDonald Drive along the corridor as an example. When the applicant first submitted the proposal for the coffee shop, it was not conducive to a neighborhood feel, Ledford said. However, after conversations with the applicant, residents will now see outdoor seating and a walk-up counter when it opens for business.

"I want to drive by and see people communing at these businesses," Ledford said. "There's so much we can do through initiatives like this just to get out and meet each other."

As they work to gain recognition as a Healthier Tennessee Neighborhood, each participating community will be required to create a Neighborhood Wellness Council, develop a yearlong plan with community-centric initiatives to encourage physical activity and healthy eating, and track the effectiveness of their strategies using measurable data.

"I think a lot of people tend to throw up their hands and quit before they start because they see the problem as being so large, and they also tend to believe they have to do it really quickly," said Rick Johnson, president of the Governor's Foundation. "We have to understand that we can take small steps, we can make a start toward this improvement and keep building on that - and that it really matters."

Email Myron Madden at mmadden@timesfreepress.com

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