Livability Solutions Improves Sustainability in Your Community

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Livability Solutions is a coalition of professionals that works to promote and realize better livability, sustainability, placemaking, and smart growth.  This partnership was initiated by 10 nonprofit organizations, including CNU, as a way to consolidate and coordinate each organization’s tools for easier access to anyone seeking to make a community or region more sustainable.

The Project for Public Spaces (PPS), a member of the Livability Solutions coalition, recently received a grant from US EPA's Office of Sustainable Communities under their Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities Program to provide free technical assistance to communities seeking to implement sustainable development and smart growth. In a community looking to "Right Fix" your city by incorporating walkable, better-performing, and vibrant streets? Here's your chance to apply for tech assistance and training on the CNU/ITE Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares manual.

This grant makes it possible for the partners at Livability Solutions to work with even more communities around the country, helping them to enhance livability, to create lasting economic and environmental improvements, and to effect positive change in the public and social health of their residents.  Applications are now being accepted from communities interested in receiving technical assistance to achieve these goals. 

See below for more, direct from PPS and Livability Solutions:

We are looking for applications from communities with a strong interest in and commitment to livability, smart growth, and sustainability principles, but who face a significant challenge or barrier to moving forward. This targeted technical assistance will provide selected communities with tools and improved capacity to achieve the livability, smart growth, and sustainability goals they have set, and engage them with a network of other communities working toward similar goals and facing similar challenges.

Working with our partners to lead one- to two-day workshops, we’ll be using time-honored approaches -- such as our Power of 10 method of inventorying and mapping a community's place-based assets -- as well as innovative new strategies for transportation and land use planning that creates better places, such as the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s Housing and Transportation (H+T®) Affordability Index. With our unique suite of tools, we can help communities through the details of implementing better places to live that are also more sustainable. With the grant from the EPA, we will be able to provide this free technical assistance to 6–12 communities in 2012. Should the funding be renewed, this will be a five-year program.

For more information on the technical assistance, our providers, the tools that we offer, and how to apply, please see the Livability Solutions website.