Board of Aldermen 11-26-2019 Page 3
Leila Melon Hello. Thank you very much for having us and thanks for moving us out of order.
Unfortunately you moved us of order so that the children from the Boys & Girls Club could come and
present, but you notice that they are not here. It turned out we didn’t get that notice until it was too late
and they, between shortage of staff, given that it was close to Thanksgiving and transporting the kids
here, it was just too much for them. So unfortunately you get me and my colleague here. So forgive
us.
My name is Leila Melon. | work for the National Park Service, a program called the River’s Trails &
Conservation Assistance Program. Cindy Heath, who is here with me, works for GP RED a non-profit.
We have worked on this project since this summer with Foundation for Health Communities and then of
course the Boys & Girls Club here. The point was to have them join a cadre of four other communities
around the State with what was originally a healthy eating active living program of the State where we
worked with children to have their voices heard for what they wanted to see for getting or transporting
themselves, walking biking from where they were to places that they liked to play; so City parks, ball
fields, etc.
We did two projects with them, we did PhotoVoice and UMap. PhotoVoice has also been done for 4
years here in the City of Nashua. Your Health Department has performed it with the Boys & Girls Club.
The kids were used to that. It’s where you take both of these programs are done nationally for a
number of years. PhotoVoice they take cameras around with the question of “how do | get myself from
my home, my school, wherever | am to places | like to play and recreate; and what’s good about the
places | go and what doesn’t work”. So what could be improved? So they take pictures of these things
that they like in their communities and then we had those pictures printed and mounted for them. We
had a display down here in your rotunda for the last month. We had it up on display at the City Library
also.
Then the second part of the program is we do UMap which is we look at a map with the kids and they
tell us where they want to go. They map those routes, then we look at them and analyze them and say,
“OK what were the nexus of projects that we could try to work on and bring to your policy makers to
have your voice be heard”. So that is the synopsis of what we did with them. Cindy is going to go
through the actual work that they have done and come up with our signature projects and our action
steps that we’ve done.
Cindy Heath It probably won’t be hard for you to imagine me as a ten-year-old, but | hope you can. So
thank you so much for giving us some time to share the work of the students that we worked with at the
Boys & Girls Club. So | am Cindy Heath as Leila said with GP RED which is a National Non-Profit that
has a project that supports children’s’ voices in community planning. So this was a project that was
supported by the Foundation for Healthy Communities. As Leila said, this was the 5" community that
we’ve worked in in the State, so we are really pleased to be able to work with the folks here in Nashua
which has a history of supporting the youth voice. So we are really pleased to be able to enhance that.
What | thought I’d do is just share the photos and give you a brief summary of the project and give you
an idea of what the students saw in their work. Then we will summarize at the end and Leila will come
back and share about next steps for us. So here we go, so if we can go back to big screen, | think I’ve
got the clicker working now. There should be a slide show icon on the very top. OK thank you very
much.
So starting with the conclusion, this project is all on-line so at the end we will have a link to that so we
can show you how that actually works. But we plotted the data that we collected between the
photographs and the mapping project where we had conversations with the students about where they
felt they liked to go in the City, where they felt they were safe going in the City and where they felt a
little bit unsafe or maybe had some concerns. So what you are seeing on this map, this is a screenshot
of the on-line version of this project. Ve have these data points; the red points represent the places
that the students they might be a little unsafe or fearful. The data we collected is all available for
