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Miami Beach is on track to become a Blue Zones city and strengthen the community’s wellbeing as it searches for funders to fuel the health-oriented program for $1.5 million a year.
In last week’s city commission meeting, officials discussed the progress of the well-being improvement initiative.
From Feb. 5-7, as Miami Today previously reported, the city was set to launch Blue Zones Ignite, a six-month in-depth readiness and feasibility assessment.
“The Blue Zones Project is a community-wide, well-being improvement initiative designed to make healthy choices easier,” says a commission memo accompanying the legislation focused on Blue Zones. “This is accomplished by encouraging sustainable changes in the built environment, building environments and social networks, and often supporting locally-driven policy changes throughout a community including such places as worksites, schools, restaurants, grocery stores, faith-based communities, convenience stores and neighborhoods.”
The Blue Zones team has been in the community speaking with city staff, community residents, stakeholders, businesses and schools, said Commissioner Tanya Bhatt, sponsor of the item.
Ms. Bhatt shared she has been working to “shore up funding, because, if you remember, colleagues, this is not something that we need to pay for. We paid for the feasibility study. That was the city’s investment, and now it is incumbent upon us to find partners in the community who will underwrite this program and be sponsors and partners with us. So, we’re talking to Mount Sinai. We’re talking to Jackson, UM, Cigna, Florida Blue, Miami-Dade County … Personify.”
Conversations with large-scale organizations are taking place, she said, in order for them to help “underwrite the five-year cost of doing this program, and the reception we’ve gotten, not just from our community members and stakeholders but from the people we’ve talked to about joining us as partners in this undertaking, is it is the right time. is the right place. It is the right message for our community, for our collective goals of trying to bring better opportunities for living better, longer everywhere, to everyone.”
Ms. Bhatt said they will be able to meet people where they are and make the healthy choice the superior option. This isn’t just about eating or exercising, she said, but about “finding fellowship and finding purpose and finding community and connectivity and all these good things.”
Since being elected and even before, said Ms. Bhatt, the commission has wanted to pivot the narrative of the city and update the brand of the city from a “party ’til you drop city to a health and wellness and kind of all things to all people.”
When asked by Ms. Bhatt to highlight some of the findings of the city’s readiness for the project, Margaret Brown, vice president of business development at Blue Zones, shared the city’s position.
“Some of the things I would say, from our findings,” said Ms. Brown, “you’re doing a fantastic job, and now it’s about, how do we connect in communities that maybe are not faring so well? Most of your communities are within about a 10-minute walk to green space. There are opportunities to activate more of those green spaces and to get more communities connected to green space.”
Ms. Brown also touched upon Blue Zones looking into how they can bring healthy options to the residents’ go-to restaurants in the city and “bring healthier options in that will actually help them optimize their bottom lines and bring that healthy choice to your neighborhoods, to your communities, to your families, working with markets and corner stores to optimize those healthy choices as well. It became clear in our findings there’s lots of opportunity there.”
Ms. Bhatt shared she believes the next point in this journey will be in September, October, “when we have our partners lined up, and we will come back to the commission with a full recommendation to move forward…. Then it’s boots on the ground and getting to work, and I for one, cannot wait. I mean, the public support of this has been outrageous in the best sense of this word.”
Commissioner David Suarez asked for the timeline on the project as he expressed his support and enthusiasm for the plans.
“The last couple of months and the next couple of months, we need to find the full funding,” said Ms. Bhatt. “It’s about $1.5 million a year over the next five years to support the hiring and training and employment of, I believe it’s four full-time employees. That is not City of Miami Beach employees. It’s a new co basically. And then they go out and they advocate and advise and help shape policy with our stakeholders, with our large-scale businesses, with folks in the county, folks at the schools, working with all of us.”
As soon as the finding is in place, Ms. Bhatt continued, “September, October, we come back here. We present our plan, and once we say, ‘Yep, let’s go.’ Then we start hiring.”
Ms. Bhatt said this is not a feel-good pie-in-the-sky, it’s a business plan that has worked in over 90 cities around the nation.
“There’s nothing like this in Southeast Florida,” she said, “and as we all know, there’s nothing like Miami Beach. We seek to be the leaders in so many globally impactful ways in terms of micro mobility and resilience and compassionate living, and we will also be a leader in this.”
