The City of Revere is honored to receive one of the 20 Community Change Micro Grants awarded by America Walks for use in 2019. This grant program supports local efforts to create safe, accessible, and enjoyable places to walk and be physically active for all community members. Since it’s beginning in 2015, this grant program has provided funds for a variety of projects demonstrating the creativity and passion of walking champions across the U.S.
The City’s Healthy Community Initiatives department’s program, Revere on the Move, was selected from over 600 applications for projects that demonstrate the passion, creativity, and commitment of local walking champions. With support from partners, including the Juliet Ashby Hillman Foundation, Lyft, the National Center on Health, Physical Activity and Disability (NCHPAD), and WalkBoston, 20 projects will be supported in 2019. Awardees will work with America Walks and other members of the Every Body Walk! Collaborative to successfully complete their projects and share their lessons with other community change agents. While the projects and programs work to improve walkability, the results of each grant will have a positive change on many areas of that community.
“Through our work, we know that when local community change agents work to get their neighborhood on the walking path, great things happen,†said Executive Director Kate Kraft. “Each of these grantees has a vision of how improving conditions for walking can lead to healthier communities. Our hope is that the work of these grantees will inspire action across the U.S. to create communities where all can be active, healthy, and engaged.â€
The City of Revere is well known for its place in history as the first public beach in America. At turn of the 20th century, the therapeutic qualities associated with salt air, walks on sandy beaches and majestic views of the Atlantic Ocean brought people to the camp on the Beachmont hillside. As Beachmont developed into a robust, blue collar neighborhood a series of public stairs were built to help residents traverse the neighborhood. Today, these stairs, just as vital to the neighborhood as when they were built, are in various states of disrepair and are unsafe and uninviting to use.
To address this problem, Beachmont residents, working alongside City employees, plan to undertake a very important 1st step in a long-range effort to restore the Beachmont Public Stairs to their earlier beautify and prominence in the neighborhood. The Key objective of this first step will be repairs to make the stairs safer for Beachmont residents to use making them more useful and adding to Revere’s ongoing efforts to promote healthy activities for residents. The $1,500 Community Change Micro Grant awarded by America Walks will be used to purchase materials for the repairs.
America Walks is a 20-year-old national non-profit organization dedicated to empowering communities and advocates to create safe, accessible, and enjoyable places to walk and be physically active for all. The organization provides its diverse network of over 30,000 advocates and hundreds of local, state, and national organizations, with the tools, resources, and experts needed to build capacity, gain experiences, and successfully promote walking and walkability. Learn more at www.americawalks.org
