Supporting Cities at the Intersection of Health, Sustainability and Climate Resilience

In November 2020, the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) announced a multi-year partnership with the National League of Cities (NLC), focused on supporting cities in their efforts to create safer, healthier spaces and help accelerate systems change to integrate health and well-being across the foundation of their communities. For much of the year, IWBI has been working closely with NLC’s program manager focused on this work, Abygail Mangar, who supports the partnership, as well as provides insight on the intersection of health, sustainability and climate resilience.

IWBI’s Director of Advocacy and Policy, Jodie Applewhite, had the opportunity to sit down with Abygail to discuss her role and her background in sustainability.

Q. Could you tell us a bit about your journey to and your role at the National League of Cities? What’s a typical day like?

A. I began my career as an Environmental Engineer. I worked at Volpe, the National Transportation Systems Center / U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) during a time when the Federal government sought to be leaders in sustainability. It feels full circle to think about where we are now, eight years later, having passed the American Rescue Plan Act and signing into law the Infrastructure Bill that both foster new opportunities in sustainability and climate resilience across all levels of government. I appreciated my time at the USDOT, and I wanted to build upon this foundation to learn more about on-the-ground existing conditions, community development, and social equity in action. I transitioned to AmeriCorps, where I served in City Year Seattle King County and then City Year Philadelphia. It was eye-opening to learn how social conditions and the built environment influence students’ ability to thrive, particularly when looking at mental health, housing, neighborhood design, and community resources overall. I learned that people in our privileged positions to influence these factors have a responsibility to understand youth and families’ experiences and empower their voices in community change. My passions around engineering, social equity, and health brought me to urban planning focused on how to cultivate holistically healthy neighborhoods. Planners historically inflicted traumatic outcomes onto residents, particularly for Black, Indigenous and other People of Color (BIPOC). If they had the power to hinder health, I felt determined that we have the capacity to nurture health. This flourished into my guiding purpose, and it is what led me to approach the Program Manager position at NLC.

As a Program Manager on NLC’s Sustainability Team, I am focused on the intersection of health, sustainability, and climate resiliency. The team’s longstanding resilience work allowed them to rally around climate resilience as a critical health equity measure, and my role was formed to support that important work. This is a new role, so there is no typical day yet! I am currently focused on learning what NLC members – elected officials, city managers, other city department leaders – are prioritizing to inform a health and climate resiliency research agenda, and I am forming relationships with existing NLC teams to learn where we can integrate health and climate resiliency to the conversations.

Q. IWBI and NLC work in partnership to support cities in their efforts to create safer, healthier spaces. How do you contribute to that work?

A. My role seeks to expand NLC’s narrative of healthier, more resilient places and spaces. I am doing this in two ways: first, NLC facilitates several technical assistance cohorts, membership councils and constituencies that regard social determinants of health topics: transportation, housing, environmental resources, community development, and more. I am having conversations with folks in these groups to understand the planning, health and sustainability challenges they face where they serve. I am gathering this knowledge to frame a research agenda for next year. I also am seeing where I can complement health and resilience values into existing NLC teams, technical assistance cohorts, and other projects. I recently contributed to the Reimagining Public Spaces to Support Main Street Retail: Municipal Action Guide. It offered recommendations to local government on how to envision holistic benefits to communities from street and built environment changes, as witnessed from the COVID-19 pandemic, such as closed streets, outdoor dining and other creative uses of public space. I described how reimagining public spaces foster safe spaces that encourage health equity; I elaborated on how they improve residents’ quality of life, incentivize walking and other low-carbon-footprint mobilities, promote physical and mental health, and enable access to previously left out groups.

Q. What’s most exciting about this partnership and its opportunities?

A. IWBI takes a critical lens to consider health in all policies when creating its standards and recommendations. NLC brings a network of relationships with local leaders who have implemented health and resilience policies, along with local leaders who face challenges implementing them. NLC’s partnership with IWBI makes certain that we can bridge these relationships and offer new strategies, tools and resources to local leaders on how to address health equity and climate resiliency. I’m excited about how IWBI is focusing on city leadership in health and well-being. I look forward to finding opportunities where NLC can provide vital knowledge and facilitate relationships that help create healthier communities and accelerate systems change to integrate health and well-being across the foundation of their communities.

Q. What other elements of your work at NLC links to IWBI’s mission regarding health and well-being?

A. Our partnership was formed to support municipal-wide actions that help local leaders advance health, well-being and social equity in everything from buildings to public spaces and from programs to policies. NLC strives to foster health equity through its sustainability work and through collaborating with teams that align with social determinants of health topics.

I am supporting NLC’s Leadership in Community Resilience (LCR) technical assistance program, which runs a cohort of cities and towns across the country to aid them as they implement sustainability programs and policies, such as hosting environmental justice workshops, mapping urban heat island neighborhood by neighborhood, and crafting city-wide sustainability plans. This program is a perfect example of NLC and IWBI’s shared mission is allowing us to learn from and amplify projects that address health and well-being.

NLC is now using these learned best practices to think about how to expand the LCR program model, and the expanded model will support local governments in taking necessary steps to embed sustainability efforts into foundational programs and practices: empowering local champions, integrating sustainability into capital improvement plans and municipal budgets, offering piloting opportunities and more.

Q. What is something you strive to and work for cities across NLC’s footprint, related to design, health, or otherwise?

A. My personal mission is that families deserve clear investments in the neighborhood they call home. What that looks like from a climate resiliency and health perspective will be different from community to community. It could mean stormwater infrastructure to prevent flooding in a BIPOC-majority neighborhood, climate ready affordable housing in areas with deteriorating structures, closed downtown streets for play and dining, or green schoolyards added to public land across the country. The main idea is to hear local leaders’ voices on how they are addressing these challenges and uplifting their work to inspire continuous change for other local leaders. My goal is to showcase a plethora of options that local leaders can use to bolster health equity so that they can see there are people in positions just like them, facing barriers similar to them, and who found ways to make programs and policies happen despite the challenges.

Q. Anything else you’d like to add?

A. I can’t wait to join with IWBI next year to support the WELL City Advisory and to see what we can build together with this diverse global group of experts! And I am eager to see how our partnership produces better support and resources for local leaders to advance health, well-being and social equity across the country!