A four-day visit to Airdrie by a group representing the Blue Zones Project has concluded and now the waiting begins to see whether the city becomes the first project outside of the U.S., and thereby achieves its goal of becoming the healthiest city in Canada.  

The team spent Monday to Thursday of this week meeting with Airdronians to learn about the health habits in the city and to teach them their findings from 43 Blue Zone cities in 9 U.S. states.  

The Blue Zones team presented a Keynote Presentation to the community on Monday, a Community Transformation Meeting on Wednesday, and met with various focus groups representing seniors, schools, community groups, restaurants and grocery stores, faith groups and employers.

Senior Vice-President of Business Development with Blue Zones and spokesperson for the group Tony Buettner was very impressed by Airdrie as a city and by the level of engagement they received from the community.  He said they find cities that are very healthy and vibrant to partner with Blue Zones and some others that he says are broken.  Airdrie fits into the first category.

"Airdrie is a community with strong leadership, a strong economy, it's growing, the average age here is I think is 34 or 35, young families.  It's a beautiful community.  I did a keynote for about 200 community leaders which is a great showing, and I asked, 'would a Blue Zone Project work here' and not one hand didn't go up."

Buettner said the group's job in Airdrie was to learn what's working and what kinds of challenges are faced and what are the opportunities of doing a community health initiative of this magnitude.  He also said it makes sense to do the project in Canada.

"Doing it somewhere in Kuwait or somewhere in Europe I think would be a little more difficult," chuckled Buettner.

Now that the Airdrie visit has ended, now comes the work of compiling a site visit findings report that will encompass 13 sectors according to Buettner.

"We'll identify who we met with, what events we did, how many came.  What were the challenges, what is already working and what are the opportunities that a Blue Zone Project and Airdrie collaboration could bring.  We will assess, is the community ready to lead a project of this magnitude?  To date, we've had thousands of cities interested.  We've chosen 43.  This project needs to be a perfect collaboration of policy leadership, organizations, individuals, media, non-profits, civic groups that come together in a systems approach to population health.  One pillar is disaligned there, this doesn't work, we're not interested in participating.  The first thing will be compiling this report and assessing readiness."

If they determine the city is ready the group will come back to Airdrie and present a proposal recommendation of what they believe a Blue Zone Project would look like.  If they feel the city isn't ready to become a Blue Zone, they'll come back to say what they feel the gaps are and meet with the leadership team in Airdrie to close those gaps to identify readiness.  

The Blue Zones team is expected to be back in Airdrie with their report in about a month.  

 

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