BackgroundThe built environment plays a critical role in promoting physical activity and health. The association between parks, as a key attribute of the built environment, and physical activity, however, remains inconclusive. This project leverages a natural experiment opportunity to assess the impact of the Community Parks Initiative (CPI), a citywide park redesign and renovation effort in New York City, on physical activity, park usage, psychosocial and mental health, and community wellbeing.MethodsThe project will use a longitudinal design with matched controls. Thirty intervention park neighborhoods are socio-demographically matched to 20 control park neighborhoods. The study will investigate whether improvements in physical activity, park usage, psychosocial and mental health, and community wellbeing are observed from baseline to 3 years post-renovation among residents in intervention vs. control neighborhoods.DiscussionThis study represents a rare opportunity to provide robust evidence to further our understanding of the complex relationship between parks and health. Findings will inform future investments in health-oriented urban design policies and offer evidence for addressing health disparities through built environment strategies.

Design thinking, a human-centred, iterative process to innovate solutions aligned with communities' tacit knowledge, has the potential to augment public health interventions. This paper presents a case study of a design thinking workshop to illustrate the process and methods to train public health researchers. A workshop was conducted to engage participants in a systematic, nonlinear process of design thinking to design possible interventions to enhance use of renovated New York City parks.Participants engaged in exercises to rapidly craft proposals for park re-design. The process involved learning about design methods to overcome limitations of linear thinking and how design thinking can be applied to public health problems that require community input.The case study demonstrated the feasibility of training public health researchers in design thinking methods that can be applied to public health problems. With increased capacity, public health researchers could apply design thinking to community collaborations to develop solutions embedded in the unique contexts of the community.

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Public health leaders increasingly recognize the importance of multi-sector partnerships and systems approaches to address obesity. Public-private partnerships (PPP), which are joint ventures between government agencies and private sector entities, may help facilitate this process, but need to be delivered through comprehensive, transparent frameworks to maximize potential benefits and minimize potential risks for all partners. The City University of New York (CUNY) School of Public Health and the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation (HWCF) propose to engage in a unique academic-private-sector research partnership to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the food and beverage industry’s investment in obesity and hunger prevention and reduction through community-level healthful eating and active living programs. The CUNY-HWCF academic-private partnership protocol described here incorporates best practices from the literature on PPP into the partnership’s design. The CUNY-HWCF partnership design demonstrates how established guidelines for partnership components will actively incorporate and promote the principles of successful PPPs identified in various research papers. These identified principles of successful PPP, including mutuality (a reciprocal relationship between entities), and equality among partners, recognition of partners’ unique strengths and roles, alignment of resources and expertise toward a common cause, and coordination and delegation of responsibilities, will be embedded throughout the design of governance, management, funding, intellectual property and accountability structures. The CUNY-HWCF partnership responds to the call for increased multi-sector work in obesity prevention and control. This framework aims to promote transparency and the shared benefits of complementary expertise while minimizing shared risks and conflicts of interest. This framework serves as a template for future academic-private research partnerships.

We benchmarked the strategies and performance of community‐based healthful eating and active living initiatives sponsored by food and beverage manufacturers. We developed company‐ and program‐level surveys for 11 companies and 38 programs using best practices in corporate benchmarking and the collective impact framework, including four domains: (a) strategy design, (b) governance and management, (c) monitoring and evaluation, and (d) reporting, communication, and stakeholder engagement. Company strategies varied, with most focusing on nutrition and physical activity promotion and little on social and environmental determinants of health. Some companies reported program investments as part of corporate social responsibility, and others managed these under general corporate or public affairs. Company scores ranged broadly, suggesting that our metrics had discriminant validity (mean overall score=59%, range=49–72%). Companies performed worst on monitoring and evaluation, highlighting the need for metrics and accountability. Benchmarking ensures accountability and enhances impact of corporate social responsibility initiatives.