Colorado county and city team up to address local food accessibility

Key Takeaways

To improve food access and build a healthier community, Boulder County, Colo. Public Health’s Healthy Eating, Active Living (HEAL) team collaborated with the city of Boulder on its comprehensive plan. The HEAL team analyzed best practices in nutritious food access and sustainable agriculture in comparable communities across the nation to help inform its recommendations for city planning, according to Amelia Hulbert, Boulder County Public Health’s Healthy Eating, Active Living (HEAL) lead.

“A comprehensive plan is visionary, it’s long range,” Hulbert said. “It should not just be a document that fits on the shelf and doesn’t get used, so when you have the opportunity to either create something new or update it, how do you make sure it [outlines] goals and policies that are going to support the work that you know needs to happen?

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Boulder County’s “Improving Food Access and Health for Boulder Residents Through Municipal Comprehensive Planning” initiative was the 2025 NACo Achievement Award “Best in Category” winner in Planning. 

“We wanted a place to specifically call out public health priorities, so when it came time to talk about allocating funding or anything like that, we can point to it and say, ‘As a county, we said that food access is important. We said that air quality monitoring is important.’”

When starting the process of creating the city’s comprehensive plan, City of Boulder staff reached out to the state health department looking for subject matter expertise on food access, which is how the HEAL team got involved, Hulbert said. 

“I think there’s this through line of ‘planners are planners, and they’re usually not subject matter experts,’” Hulbert said. “And so, when they seek out subject matter expertise, how can we make sure those connections can easily be made to people in their own community who are going to not only know the content, but know the issues? I think it’s a cool process, and others could totally do the same thing.”

The HEAL team analyzed comprehensive plans from a dozen municipalities like Boulder, including Ann Arbor, Mich.; Asheville, N.C.; Burlington, Vt. and Provo, Utah. Factors considered when choosing the municipalities included population size, economic and demographic makeup and communities with a mix of urban, suburban and unincorporated rural land, according to Hulbert. 

Olivia Ott, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Public Health Associate working with the HEAL team, identified 34 model policies from the plans and categorized them into five themes to compare against the City of Boulder’s existing plan: healthy food access, sustainability, built environment, equity/culture and local agriculture. 

“We’re usually looking to a couple key cities across the nation that we would consider cutting edge and innovative,” Hulbert said. “So, we just applied that methodology to something very specific, of digging into, ‘How are their plans structured? What are they saying?’ And then thinking about, ‘Does it make sense for our community?’ And then [assessing] ‘What are other things that are really specific to our community?’”

Factoring in the identified best practices, Ott scored the city’s plan into three categories: “Present” in Boulder’s current plan, “Somewhat Present” and “Absent.” 

“That kind of grading system actually worked really well, and it really resonated with the planning team,” Hulbert said. “You could tell that they were like, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re doing really well here.’ And then, it was really specific, of ‘Hey, other people are talking about this one thing, and you all aren't.’ I think it was just put in a way that they could really absorb.”

The HEAL team’s research and recommendations were presented to the Boulder and Broomfield County’s Food Security Network (BBFSN), a community group made up of people with lived experience of food insecurity and organizations that serve food insecure individuals, that were providing input on the city’s comprehensive plan. The HEAL team’s findings helped inform the BBFSN’s recommendations to the planning department. 

While the HEAL team had the expertise and staffing to do the research, it was “critically important” to then integrate community engagement with the BBFSN into the work, Hulbert noted. Final recommendations for the city plan from the BBFSN address food access through six different categories: transportation, land use, housing, climate, economic development and food systems. 

“We did what was within our wheelhouse, and then we knew that there was another group who has a totally different wheelhouse, so it was how could we then pass off what we’ve done and have them take it a step further?” Hulbert said. “Because I think what they brought is more of that lived experience community storytelling. Olivia can say, ‘It's important to emphasize culturally relevant foods.’ And then there’s likely a community member that can actually give real voice to that and why that matters.”