To find out what residents in the area would like to see in a new park, we created a survey. With the help of our community partner, Riverfront Recapture, we formulated a face-to-face survey that was filled out by participants with the help from a student team member.
We made multiple trips to the field to collect responses and gather information from a representative sample of the neighborhoods surrounding the proposed park. Our team primarily conducted surveys outdoors. We approached people in well-trafficked public areas in and around the surrounding neighborhoods. We surveyed a total of 67 people at the following locations during the following times:
- Windsor Shopping Center: midday Wednesday (4/3), two Thursday afternoons
Windsor Shopping Center photo by Dawn-Marie (3/7) & (3/14), midday Friday (3/29)
- Windsor/Hartford town line: Saturday (3/30) in the late in the afternoon
- Downtown Hartford near the Bushnell Theater: Tuesday (3/26) midday, various times
- Lily’s Soul Food, the Windsor Community Center, and the local pizza shop on another Thursday afternoon (3/14)
Throughout the surveying process, we took the time to familiarize an individual with Riverfront Recapture and our project, and answered any questions participants had while completing our survey.
NRZ Meetings:
After completing our surveys in public spaces, we attended two North East Revitalization NRZ meetings to inform residents about the park and get more input from the residents in the 06120 zip code. The first meeting was very informative. We learned about issues that plague the community and possible solutions, such as housing revitalization, improving education and the lack of a quality grocery stores that provide fresh produce.
Healthy Hartford Hub, a community development project, plan to provide a grocery store downtown, to increase access to healthy and affordable foods. In addition, they plan to supply health promoting services adjacent to the supermarket that may include a clinic, pharmacy, a wellness studio and or a community teaching kitchen. Their goal is to improve health outcome of Hartford residents living in the North Hartford Promise Zone, and they provided statistics of diet-related diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and hypertension, supplied by City Health Dashboard.com. It states that the life expectancy of the residents living in the NHPZ is 16 years less than residents in West Hartford.
At the second meeting, we were able to share a flyer and provide even more information to the community about our survey and the future plans for a park in their area.