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Education

Students and Community Come Together to take the Pulse of Franklin Park

Students in Jonathan Jay’s assessment and planning for health promotion course collaborated with neighborhood organizations and community members to document the health assets and challenges facing nearby residents and visitors to Franklin Park, Boston’s largest public park.

Franklin Park, Boston’s largest public park, has offered respite from the crowds, noise, and grit of city life since the late 1800s. Its 527-acre expanse of fields and forest border five of the city’s most populous and diverse neighborhoods and position it as a valuable resource.

Following the pandemic, a global surge in the popularity of parks and a heightened appreciation for their mental and physical health benefits spurred an influx of funding for national park revitalization efforts. In Boston, Franklin Park will undergo a $23 million facelift in coming years, an initiative that comes on the heels of decades of underinvestment that residents say reduced accessibility and safety, and jeopardized the environmental and public health benefits of the historic space.

A new report compiled by students in an assessment and planning for health promotion course at the School of Public Health aims to uplift community voices in the conversation about Franklin Park’s future. The 66-page document, released January 2024, details the findings of a community health needs assessment the students conducted in spring and summer of 2023 in collaboration with the Franklin Park Coalition (FPC), a local nonprofit organization dedicated to stewardship of the park. A sample community health improvement plan at the end of the report suggests a framework for addressing the needs the students identified in their assessment.

Through primary and secondary data collection—including walking surveys of the land, interviews with key informants, and review of data from the US Census Bureau, Trust for Public Land, and Health of Boston Survey of People Experiencing Homelessness—the students sought to understand the health assets and challenges facing nearby residents and visitors to Franklin Park. Their report touches on several complex public health crises that loom large over the future of the park, such as historical and ongoing disinvestment in surrounding communities of color and the city’s worsening opioid and homelessness epidemics.

Jonathan Jay, an assistant professor of community health sciences and the students’ instructor, selected Franklin Park as the focus of the course with these issues in mind. After civil rights icon Jean McGuire was stabbed in Franklin Park in late 2022, Jay, who lives in the area and frequently visits the park himself, attended a community meeting about park safety hosted by FPC. The divergence of opinion on how to handle the problems affecting the park captured his attention.

In recent years, controversy has come to head over a proposal to redevelop the deteriorating Lemuel Shattuck Hospital, a 13-acre medical campus on Franklin Park’s grounds, and replace it with supportive housing and substance use and mental health treatment facilities rather than return the land to the park. Although the Shattuck campus houses similar services today, including a homeless shelter, a methadone clinic, and hospital beds for psychiatric patients and incarcerated people, nearby residents have expressed concern about the proposed expansion of services. Residents and political leaders have cited open drug use and discarded needles, among other drug paraphernalia, as common reasons for feeling unsafe in the park. Many fear that the redevelopment will exacerbate these problems and encroach upon Franklin Park’s green space, a valuable and limited public resource in the area.

The proposal has pitted housing, mental health, and harm reduction activists against environmental activists, and has divided neighbors. It occurred to Jay that his students—and potentially the community—could benefit from further study of the public health and racial justice dilemmas at the core of the conflict.

“On the one hand, [my] neighbors said that the Shattuck services posed hazards to the community, and that it was not a coincidence the state had put them near Franklin Park, the largest park that serves Boston’s predominantly Black neighborhoods. On the other hand, Shattuck providers said these services met an urgent health need,” says Jay. “I thought, ‘This is the kind of problem we need to learn how to navigate as public health students and practitioners.’”

Jay’s students enthusiastically embraced the assignment. When the semester came to an end and the class was unable to capture the perspectives of Shattuck Hospital stakeholders due to time constraints, they collectively decided their work was not complete and two students, Katherine Im and Carley Ruemmele, volunteered to continue working on the project through the summer.

“We wanted to create a report that would make an impact, and not just a project that will be graded and shelved,” says Im, who conducted a stakeholder analysis and interviewed staff at the Shattuck, enabling Ruemmele to finalize the report by giving it a cohesive narrative voice, a new section on limitations, and a summary of key findings. Their work identified opportunities for building trust and community between neighborhood residents and Shattuck stakeholders—an actionable step that could help resolve the longstanding debates.

“I learned a lot about the importance of pausing throughout a project and reflecting­ on questions such as: Who is this for? Are we achieving our desired intent? Whose voices are centered here and whose are missing?” says Ruemmele, who studies community assessment, program development, implementation, and evaluation (CAPDIE) at SPH. “Slowing down and reflecting is something I hope to take away and incorporate in whatever community-based work I do in the future.”

When the class presented their findings at the end of the semester, Christine Poff, a leader at FPC, says she furiously took notes, not realizing how much more the students had in store in their coming report.

“It was great working with public health students who had the time, expertise, and commitment to dig into the complicated issues facing Franklin Park,” says Poff. “FPC is a small, nearly all volunteer organization, we could never have compiled such helpful quantitative and qualitative data without [Jay’s] class.”

To learn more about the assets and challenges facing Franklin Park visitors, people who live near the park, and other key stakeholders, please read the students’ full Franklin Park Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) available for download below.