Mayor Nirenberg is committed to helping children grow up healthy and purposeful about allocating resources where they’re needed most. He leans on his Department of Public Health to tell him “what he doesn’t want to know about the health of his city,” so he can draft policies that address those challenges. For example, the city is working to ensure that new sidewalks are built wide enough to encourage people to walk on them, and building them in the historically under-resourced neighborhoods that never had sidewalks before.
Mayor Nirenberg recognizes the challenges of addressing childhood obesity in a city that was built more than 300 years ago and historically has struggled with intractable generational poverty and wide socioeconomic gaps. But he’s seeing results and remains hopeful about the future.
