This part of Pierce County is a Blue Zones Project. Will it improve lives there?

Parkland and Spanaway, your time in the national health spotlight is about to start.

The two communities are the latest to join the Blue Zones Project, a collaboration of local health care systems and Pierce County to improve health outcomes for residents, with an initial nine months of set-up then four years of continued monitoring.

Some areas, such as Fort Worth, have continued beyond the initial introduction.

It has nothing to do with land zoning. It does use a variety of community outreach programs, business partnerships, school programs and more to help establish healthier habits.

“Strategies will be chosen based on the Blue Zones Project team’s community assessment in collaboration with community leaders and the Blueprint planning done by a core leadership team made up of citizens and leaders from the community,” according to Blue Zones’ online FAQ.

The project says it activates through “people, places and policy” with the community using the Blue Zones Project framework. Initially, residents can go to bluezones.com/bzpparklandspanaway and take online tests measuring vitality, happiness and get “Blue Zones checklists” for setting up a home “to improve well-being,” according to the FAQ.

“Civic leaders play a key role by adopting and implementing best practices in policies and programs to improve the built environment, food environment, and smoke-free environment. Restaurants, schools, grocery stores, faith-based communities and other organizations can participate by making changes that will create healthier environments for customers, students, members and residents,” the FAQ says.

How it started

You might be familiar with books from which The Blue Zones Project gets its name, which were authored by American National Geographic fellow Dan Buettner. His first “Blue Zones” book, published in 2008, came after his reporting in National Geographic magazine on locations around the world that exhibit longevity among their residents.

Original “Blue Zones” sites identified by Buettner include the Greek island of Ikaria; Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Loma Linda, California and Costa Rica.

In the following years, Buettner and the Blue Zones Project team partnered with different cities and states, local governments, “large employers, and health insurance companies to implement Blue Zones Projects in communities, workplaces, and universities,” according to the Blue Zones website.

The Blue Zones Project describes itself as “well-being initiatives that apply lessons from the Blue Zones to entire communities by focusing on changes to the local environment, public policy, and social networks.”

It focuses on what it calls the “Life Radius” — the area close to home where people spend 90 percent of their lives, with guiding principles drawn from the original Blue Zones research for local projects to organize around through Its “Power 9” strategies:

▪ Move naturally (gaining exercise from daily living).

▪ Purpose (finding and knowing your sense of purpose).

▪ Downshift (easing stress).

▪ 80 percent rule (cutting off eating before you are full).

▪ Plant slant (daily diet that does not emphasize meat).

▪ Wine at 5 (moderate drinking 1-2 glasses a day with friends and/or with food).

▪ Belong (participation in some faith-based community).

▪ Loved ones first (emphasis on family).

▪ Right tribe (creating social circles that support healthy behaviors).

Typical project implementation examples, according to information from the Blue Zones website, include programs getting residents of all ages to walk more, partnerships with local grocers/convenience stores to promote healthy foods, planning for more walking and biking paths in the area and for community building creating walking, healthy eating and purpose groups for social engagement.

Among local businesses and schools, it can include working with local restaurants to enhance menus and grow business, working to create healthier worksites and adding healthy foods and increasing physical activity in schools.

Blue Zones Projects have partnered with areas as varied as Fort Worth, Hawaii, sites in Iowa, Florida and California, and closer to home Klamath Falls, Oregon and Walla Walla, Washington. Each set out with a goal of helping their respective populations get healthier.

Now, it’s Parkland’s and Spanaway’s turn.

How sites were chosen

County Executive Bruce Dammeier told The News Tribune in a recent phone interview that he started hearing about the project a few years ago during a national conference attended by county executives.

“I have been very concerned about our county health rankings. For a long time ... Pierce County is kind of an outlier of the Puget Sound counties, and not in a good way,” Dammeier said. “And I’m always looking for what people have been doing that will move the needle in terms of creating a healthier kind of community.”

The County Health Rankings & Roadmaps is a program of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It offers local and national snapshots of residents’ health. In the 2022 report, Pierce County ranked 19th of Washington’s 39 counties in overall health outcomes. San Juan County was No. 1, followed by King and Island counties.

In recent years, Pierce County has dipped into the mid-20s in the rankings.

More specifically, Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department has noted, “Heart disease is worse in the Parkland area than in our county or state.”

In the health department’s Community of Focus page, it says, “Fewer people in Parkland have a high school diploma, college education or jobs, compared to the county. Some people are concerned about affordable housing and neighborhood safety. These concerns affect health.”

In Fort Worth, the project started in late 2014 and eventually became the nation’s largest certified Blue Zones Community. The project’s website says, “Smoking decreased 31 percent, residents who exercised 30+ minutes 3+ days per week increased 17 percent, and consumption of fruits and vegetables increased 3 percent.”

Business website Fort Worth Inc. reported last year that “Amid the COVID-19 pandemic and compared to a baseline year of 2014, obesity ‘held steady,’ while increasing nationally. Smoking declined, and the numbers of people suffering from high blood pressure and high cholesterol declined. Exercise increased, and the number of people who said they biked or walked for routine trips rose.”

The city has achieved its results making myriad changes.

Among them, it implemented new smoking reduction policies and “adopted a master thoroughfare plan with the goal of providing: a complete and connected, context-sensitive transportation system for all users that supports mobility, healthy living and economic benefit,” according to the project’s city page.

It also worked with grocers to improve offerings and schools with various design changes.

“In Fort Worth, 45 schools from four school districts have became Blue Zones Project Schools,” it stated. “Well-being improvements include water bottle filling stations, removing soda and adding healthy choices to vending machines, campus gardens, mindfulness exercises, additional after-school programs and clubs, and adding salad bars to cafeterias.”

Dammeier said visiting and seeing results from the Fort Worth project were part of what propelled him to explore bringing the project here. He said he was most impressed how elementary schools were a springboard for the rest of the community.

At one Forth Worth school he visited, “They grew a garden in their courtyard and got the kids involved in that. They changed how they eat. They got the community involved,” he said. “They would bring in the community to do kind of community walks and things like that. So it became a catalyst. Elementary schools are kind of community centers all unto themselves.”

Back in Pierce County, he noted different areas needing improvement.

“It’s low birth-weight babies, it’s low education, it’s low income, it’s (being) more likely to die before age 70. When you plot those out by by ZIP code, or census tract. Typically, there’s a number of these areas that pop out as areas that really need some significant investment,” Dammeier said. “So for me, it became an opportunity to both improve health outcomes and strengthen community.”

For Parkland-Spanaway, he sees it as a “proof of concept” test run possibly for other areas.

“It seemed like a place where there was real opportunity to move into a community that could benefit from support and could grow in its sense of community, improve health outcomes and improve community connection,” Dammeier said.

Program rollout

The program and public-private partnership introduced its plans to the area last fall, with a broadcast describing Blue Zones and ways communities can change their health outcomes.

In the months since, the public-private partnership contract and funding for implementation have come together via MultiCare, VMFH and the county. County Council in August released $1 million that had been included in the county budget for the project, with the health systems committing $2.5 million each. Future and additional funding may come from grants, according to Blue Zones representative Naomi Imatome-Yun.

“By partnering with Virginia Mason Franciscan Health and Pierce County to bring the Blue Zones Project to Parkland and Spanaway, we are building a stronger, more equitable community that will benefit our entire county,” said Bill Robertson, CEO of MultiCare, in a release introducing the project.

“Everyone has the right to be healthy, and it shouldn’t depend on our ZIP code, economic status, or the color of our skin ... we are dedicated to finding new and equitable approaches and strategies to building healthy communities,” said Ketul J. Patel, CEO of Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, in the release.

Over the first nine months, the community will be surveyed as to priorities. Then the project, working with the community, will come up with strategies, policies and programs, measure results and adjust/revise as needed in the following four years.

“One thing is a Gallup Well-Being Index is measured every year,” said Imatome-Yun, “And that’s the biggest, community-wide well-being measurement. And then there’s multiple progress metrics.”

The index, commissioned as part of Blue Zones work, looks at factors such as rates of obesity, smoking, daily stress and more.

Council member Jani Hitchen’s Sixth District includes Parkland. She told The News Tribune in a recent phone interview that she was initially skeptical about the project.

“It took me a while to really get to a place where I thought this would be a good opportunity for Parkland and Spanaway,” she said.

The tension, she explained, stemmed from an outside entity coming in to help and the work of “how do you hold true to the voice of Parkland and Spanaway?”

“People have come into Parkland-Spanaway, many times and said, ‘We want to do X, let’s talk about it,’ and then not delivered. And I have been very clear that that cannot happen with Blue Zones.”

Hiring of Blue Zones staff will come from within the community, both Hitchen and Imatome-Yun told The News Tribune. Currently, five positions await to be filled: executive director, public policy lead, organization and well-being lead, engagement and marketing leadand project manager/office coordinator.

“We’re hiring in Parkland-Spanaway, right now to get that team on the ground. And so that’s really leaning on people in the community, who know their community best. They know the needs,” Imatome-Yun said.

“It starts with working with the two school districts and the college campus, here in our community. And really making sure that the scope of work plan that was put together calls out different groups of people,” Hitchen said.

Council Vice Chair Marty Campbell sponsored the funding resolution in August. His District 5 includes both Parkland and Spanaway.

He said during the Aug. 23 council meeting that the project made sense from a community improvement standpoint.

“When you start looking at health, with food, what food you’re eating, access to healthy food, the built environment, walkability, bikeability within your environment, so people are out moving around more,” he noted. “Lack of investment in that community has to change.”

“The reason the top funders in this are local hospitals, they’re putting in millions of dollars, they’re going to save tens of millions of dollars in less fire calls, less emergency room visits, less long, chronic illnesses that are addressed ... when we look at the health and equity of Pierce County, we know that Parkland-Spanaway has some of the greatest need,” Campbell said.

Council member Amy Cruver, whose District 3 includes Spanaway, was the lone no vote against the appropriation at the August council session.

“I just feel that these are matters of personal choice rather than public taxpayer investment,” she said at the meeting. “And I’ve been around awhile to see programs come and go.

“We just have a lot of things going on. I hope I’m proven wrong,” she added. “I think there’s more unintended consequences coming with such a program that is transformational. It’s not just about diet.”

Campbell, in closing remarks during the county’s 2021 broadcast, said, “I know that people, children born in Parkland and Spanaway today will live up to 10 years less than just other parts of our county. These health disparities are real. And they’re magnified in communities like Parkland-Spanaway.”

He said he attended a Blue Zones conference about a decade ago, bought the original book and reread it after hearing Dammeier’s interest in introducing it here.

He said he started re-familiarizing himself with the guidelines, putting them into practice, and at that time lost “about 20 pounds. And really just when I get bored and start taking a walk to the fridge, I take a walk around the block.”

“It isn’t about massively redoing everything that we have,” he added. “It’s helping people and encourage them to make the small changes in the choices every day, and doing it as a community and bringing everyone in and being part of it.”

More recently, Dammeier also acknowledged the program’s transformational aspect. In his own life, he told The News Tribune, he’s applied Blue Zones “Power 9” principles and has seen changes beyond losing pounds, taking particular interest in down-shifting and finding ways to curb stress.

“I think it’s been helping me manage my stress better,” he said. “I still have some things that I’m working on.”

For more information

▪ To apply for work with the Parkland-Spanaway Blue Zones project: Careers - Blue Zones.

▪ To sign up for regular updates and/or to get involved on the local program: BLUE ZONES, LLC (list-manage.com)

▪ To learn more on Blue Zones Projects in other areas: bluezones.com/services/blue-zones-project/