Starr County

Utilizing Communications to Increase Park Awareness

July 9, 2025 by valeriejauregui

By: Valerie Jauregui and Kelsey Coats

There are many reasons people might not use their local parks and recreation amenities. According to Texas A&M AgriLife Extension’s Urban and Municipal Parks program (UMP), some reasons cited by residents for nonuse are time, age/age appropriateness, proximity/connectivity, utilizing other resources, lack of knowledge, and usability (Walker et al.,2022). As practitioners, we cannot necessarily address some of these reasons (i.e., time), or they require additional time to address (i.e., proximity/connectivity). However, lack of knowledge is one barrier that can be reasonably addressed in the short term. The Working on Wellness Environments (WOW-E) and WOW-E communities have sought communication strategies to address the lack of knowledge of parks and public spaces for being active.

‘How do you Park’ communication campaign – Vernon, Texas

The City of Vernon Community Development department, Vernon Main Street and Tourism, and other partners identified a lack of knowledge of public parks, outdoor spaces, and ways to be physically active in the community. Together, they applied for the 2024 WOW-E Community Challenge to receive technical assistance to develop, plan, and evaluate a communications campaign to promote their local parks and physical activity amenities.

With assistance from the WOW-E team, the local Vernon group attended WOW-E cohort sessions to define and analyze their audience, assess communication strategies to best fit their audience, complete an amenity inventory of all of the amenities available at their parks and public spaces, conducted community engagement to inform their graphics and messaging for the campaign, and planned their communication campaign and evaluation methods.

The group kickstarted their campaign in May. Their billboard is currently running, and they have placed concrete clings promoting their parks around town. The group has also started posting on their social media profiles and will engage with their local community through messages, shares, and hashtags. The local team will continue to evaluate and monitor their campaign to gather feedback and responses. To learn more about these efforts, visit the City of Vernon Facebook page and the Vernon Mainstreet and Tourism Facebook page.

Concrete Cling (ground sticker) at local park

WOW-E’s 2023 Active People Healthy Nation pilot awareness campaign

WOW-E collaborated with three communities in South Texas to pilot test a communication campaign to increase park and public space awareness for people to be active. The campaign was part of the CDC’s Active People, Healthy Nation effort to get 27 million more Americans active by 2027. Listening sessions found that an existing shared value among the audience was time with family and friends, which helped guide the campaign. Focus groups helped ensure that communication materials, messages, and imagery were relevant to the community. The focus groups also increased awareness themselves, as one participant said, “I did not know there were this many parks.”

WOW-E’s APHN awareness campaign ran for approximately eight weeks. The communication campaign consisted of billboards, social media posts, banners, ground stickers, bookmarks, amenity inventories, and maps of the communities’ parks and places to be active. The campaign website included the maps and amenity inventories. Billboards included a short URL to the campaign website, social media posts included links to the campaign website, and ground stickers and bookmarks included QR codes to the campaign website. Social media posts, billboards, bookmarks, and banners were offered in English and Spanish. Different versions of the communication products ran in different communities. To read more about this effort, visit our blog! Interested in becoming a WOW-E community? Click here to see if your community is eligible.

Resources:

Walker, J.R., Lee, J., Gunderson, E., & Coats, K. (2022, September 20 – 22). If you build it will they come? the nonuse phenomenon. [Poster presentation]. 2022 National Parks and Recreations Association Annual Conference, Phoenix, AZ, United States. https://agrilife.org/urbanparks/files/2024/12/Urban-and-Municipal-Parks-2022-NRPA-Poster.pdf

Team Spotlight: Yinglan Hao

May 15, 2024 by kcoats

Yinglan Hao is a third year Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA) student at Texas A&M University and Graduate Assistant with WOW-E. WOW-E has been privileged to have Yinglan on the team for the past two and a half years. Yinglan is finishing her final project on park optimization for night time use and will graduate in May. She recently received a Graduate Honor Award in the Analysis and Planning category from the Texas Chapter of the American Society Landscape Architects (TXASLA) for her final project.

While working on her MLA she developed an interest in research-based design, urban design, and urban planning analysis which she focuses on in her exit project. Her exit project examines neighborhood suitability for nighttime use, a topic that she says has been somewhat neglected by existing research. She worked with her chair, Dr. Yang Song, and his PhD candidate to analyze visitor patterns through big data, tailor designs to community needs, and integrate adaptive lighting design strategies. She found that much of the existing research examining lighting and lumens focused on urban areas, largely neglecting lighting in the context of neighborhood parks. She used Austin, Texas as her community of focus as neighborhood parks are their primary type of park. She asserts that parks are an important resource for people’s health and can be underutilized if nighttime design and lighting are not thought out. If the design is purely human centric design, it will either fall into the old path of over-illumination (light pollution) and energy waste, or it will lead to a monotonous uniform lighting design that fails to achieve the goal of increasing nighttime park usage. Yinglan maintains that park practitioners and communities care more about the outcomes and pros and cons of lighting fixtures, but the existing guides’ jargon and lighting terms are not user friendly enough for them to work with. As a result of her literature review and research, Yinglan and Dr. Song are working to develop a user-friendly neighborhood lighting toolkit.

Graphics courtesy of Yinglan Hao, from her final project. Click each image to view larger.

Yinglan has been instrumental in the planning and execution of WOW-E projects. She works with Dr. Sungmin Lee and Dr. Yang Song to develop project renderings to help communities visualize projects. This involves understanding all of the community engagement conducted for a project and understanding the project’s goals. Prior to working with WOW-E, Yinglan had not worked on projects with community engagement. Now in all of her designs she thinks about how people will use the space when the project is implemented. She realized that combining community engagement with data-based/research-based analysis is the best way to contribute to underserved communities. Her favorite WOW-E project to work on was renderings for the St. Eugene project in Roma, Texas. She especially enjoyed getting to design a painted place that had birds in the design. The implementation of this design made the path from the plaza to the school more pedestrian friendly while echoing the local bird watching culture.

Renderings Yinglan created for various WOW-E Connectivity projects. Click each image to make larger.

Yinglan will continue with her studies prior to graduation and will continue to support WOW-E in the meantime. To learn more about the working on Wellness Environments program, visit wowe.tamu.edu.

Farm to School

February 15, 2023 by Kailey

by Victorino Cantu, M. Garcia & A. Garza

Students pointing to the citrus they grew

The Farm to School Program Mission

The goal of the farm to school program is to bring local foods to the school cafeteria and agricultural education to K-12 students, encouraging children to make healthy food choices and inspiring sustainable connections to local food, while helping to boost the local economy.

Students planting a tree in their orchard

The Plan to Implement Farm to School Efforts in Starr County

Our planned intervention included the planting of a fruit orchard that is a continuation and enhancement of the existing school garden. This intervention was introduced while searching for options to replace missing local farms.

Students standing in the orchard holes for the trees to be planted in

Who Makes These Efforts Possible?

The Farm to School efforts would not be possible without R.T. Barrera Elementary and its administration. The school has incorporated Farm to school efforts into their Physical Education curriculum. They have also recently started an Ag Club that helps monitor the orchard and ensure that the trees are doing well health-wise.

Plowing and digging the site of the orchard

Other Experiences the Students get from Farm to School

As a direct result, students also get to learn the practice of farming and preparing their own healthy meals/snacks.

Students learning healthy food preparation

The Rewards of the Farm to School Program

This intervention provides much needed access to healthy produce that is integral for the long-term health of the community and the students. Planting an orchard demonstrates a commitment to community nutrition for the next 20 years and beyond. This proposal provides an ongoing supply of fresh, seasonal fruit at a location and institution that is accessible to much of the local community.

Pictures provided by R.T. Barrera Elementary Principal, Mrs. M. Garcia and Physical Education Coach, Mr. A. Garza. (01/19/2023)

Increase Your Community Engagement Through a ‘Pop-Up’ Strategy

February 8, 2023 by Kailey

by Kelsey Coats & Emily Gunderson

We know community meetings might draw people in, but they also have inherent limitations. To increase your civic engagement response, you will want to go a step further to get input from different kinds of people.

Enter “pop-up” community engagement. Instead of requiring people to come to you, you should go to where people already gather and meet them when it’s convenient for your participants. Pop-up engagements typically reach underrepresented populations, offer more choices for those who stop by your table, and frequently solicit valuable engagement, input, and results.

What’s Wrong with Community Meetings?

Nothing is wrong with town hall-style meetings, but they tend to be overly relied upon and lack efficacy in certain aspects. For example, community meetings are held one at a time and in a location that works for the organizers. This might or might not work for people’s schedules and could require time out of a busy day to attend. If you don’t offer childcare, attendees must either bring children with them, which is potentially disruptive, or figure out childcare on their own.

Community meetings also require sitting and listening, perhaps for 30 minutes or longer, and can be perceived as uninteresting. Finally, these meetings are limited in their variety of attendees; the same people tend to show up time and again. While their thoughts are important, we also want to hear from other people.

Participant giving input at Dollar General

A Best Practice for Community Engagement

Pop-up community engagement solves many of these issues. They can reach more people because you go to people where they are at multiple times and places. This means reaching individuals that might not traditionally attend community meetings, for whatever reason. People can spend as much or as little time as they want talking to you and leaving comments – there’s less pressure overall. Even if individuals don’t overtly seem to engage, they can see you were there, trying to get input. It makes an impression and signage can relay web addresses for them to visit at a later time. Pop-up community engagement also offers you the chance to provide important resources and directly answer questions. You might be surprised by the directions your conversations may go.

Where to Start with Pop-up Community Engagement

Now that you know why this style of engagement offers more efficacy than traditional community meetings, where to start? You want to know your why, who, where, what, and when.

WHY? Why are you engaging people? This will drive your focus.
WHO? Whom are you trying to talk to in the community?
WHERE? Where do they go in the community?
WHAT? What are they doing there and how could you fit in?

WHEN? When do they go there? Make a list and visit each location, watching for patterns of attendance and flow.

Take time to map out your pop-up locations, making sure they are equitably distributed throughout the community. If you plan on using the same posters/signage, have a plan for how you will know which comments came from where. One strategy is to use different color markers by location. Another is to take pictures between pop-up locations.

Be sure to have a sign at your pop-up saying that you’re doing citizen engagement and not trying to sell anything. This will go a long way toward increasing engagement.

Once you’ve had a few rounds of pop-up community locations, take time to analyze the results. Compare them to past meeting results and comments. How are they different? An effective engagement strategy should be a blend of styles that works best for you and your goals, helping meet the needs of the people you serve.