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Underprivileged urban communities often have less parks than wealthier communities. Even when new parks are built and are physically accessible to such communities, park design and programming is often undertaken without community input and may result in psychologically inaccessible parks. To address this problem, the California Department of Parks and Recreation piloted a community outreach intervention in a newly created Los Angeles park. It employed the promotores model, which uses community members as outreach ambassadors. Using participant observations, interviews, and a survey, we evaluated the intervention's success in recruiting and training promotores, organizing community outreach, and making the park more accessible to underprivileged communities. We found that the promotores helped increase community involvement in park programming, thus enhancing procedural justice, and also helped enhance park use by previously underrepresented groups. We conclude with recommendations about how the promotores model can be improved and used more effectively in park planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global COVID-19 pandemic has led households to find creative ways to share resources to address isolation, stress, and anxiety. We build on these social experiments to suggest that sharing in housing and neighborhoods can lead to better mental health and wellbeing. The capabilities approach, popularized by philosophers Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, provides a theoretical perspective for integrating sharing options into housing and neighborhood design, regulation, and investment. We offer a framework delineating dimensions of sharing that has the potential to encourage more sharing and shift planning emphasis from housing as an outcome to one that promotes sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]