A recent CED blog post introduced Fitwel – a new certification system focused on occupant health and wellness in buildings – and began to explore what a ‘healthy’ building looks like. This post continues the discussion, highlighting five examples of features that the Fitwel system recognizes. The pu … Read more

Rating systems have helped make buildings more energy efficient over the last two decades, but they overlooked something important: the well-being of the people inside those buildings. ‘Health and wellness’ is an emerging concept that strives to change that, by redirecting the focus to building occu … Read more

There have been a lot of water issues in the news recently. Here’s a summary of a few of the stories we’ve been following that involve the important and often complicated role state government plays. Bad News. About a year ago, the NC Department of Health and Human Services advised hundreds of priva … Read more

The Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust is framing a new place-based initiative around an important question related to the long-term prosperity and vitality of rural communities in the state: What if rural North Carolina was a healthy place? For example: • What if fewer people suffered from diabetes? … Read more

Across the United States, malls are an endangered species. Once a marker of local economic success, the traditional, enclosed shopping mall are becoming abandoned, irrelevant, and forgotten structures. Many anchor tenants, like J.C. Penney, are relocating or closing down altogether. The high costs a … Read more

John Stephens is a School of Government faculty member. How economic development and community well-being relate to environmental and human health is the focus of the state-level group Healthy Environments Collaborative (HEC).  Local community and economic development advocates and program managers … Read more

Ben Houck is a graduate of the UNC Department of City and Regional Planning and a CCP Intern working in Lenoir County. I confess this is really my third attempt at this, but the lesson remains the same: occupations are complex. A Medical Technologist is not a Medical Technician, I now understand. An … Read more

One interesting program suggested to me was Threads for HOPE, a project in Salemburg, NC that stems from a public health program out of the Center for Health Promotion, Disease Prevention at the UNC School of Public Health.  Threads for HOPE adds an business development/entrepreneurship element to p … Read more

Here is an article from The Nation about an interesting program in Mileston, Holmes County, MS, the poorest county in the poorest state in the country.  It is a program that combines farming, farmer’s markets, government entitlement programs, health, youth programming, and education.