Equity in Access to Parks in Chesterfield, Virginia

Overview

Chesterfield County's Department of Parks and Recreation is concerned with the changing demographics of Chesterfield county as the population increases, ages, and becomes more diverse. As Chesterfield grows, the Department of Parks and recreation wants to ensure that the people serve have equitable access to their facilities. For this project we needed to find a way to define and quantify equity. The next leg of the project is determining equitable access, which involves an understanding of Chesterfield’s parks and their facilities. Our goals were to determine travel time and distance data for each park, create a measure of equity for each park, and rank each park based on their ability to serve their surrounding area. Using Chesterfield Parks’s GeoSpace resources we were able to attain detailed location and facilities data on their parks. The park’s qualities were ranked based on total facilities to provide a rudimentary “quality score” that can be further refined with more time and analysis of other park scoring systems. our literature determined the best variables to research for equity included analyzing vulnerable demographics, which we collected using the US Census’s 5-Year American Community Surveys and geospace information to determine the quantity of vulnerable population demographics on a census tract level and estimate an approximate number of of people of these groups that are closest to the parks in their census areas. With this information and further analysis we can get a better understanding of who are closest to which parks and with further literature analysis understand if the facilities of each park best serve the communities closest to them.

Overview

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Interns

R. Mousa Touré

Kyle Jacobs

Kwabeana Boateng