Friday, April 30, 2010
8:00am-5:00pm

The Coronado Ballroom
3701 Lindell Boulevard
St. Louis, MO 63108

Conference Overview
Trailnet announces our 3rd Annual Conference, Livable St. Louis: Creating a Movement of Healthy, Active & Vibrant Communities. The full day conference features keynote sessions from national speakers and regional experts. Join us as we focus on transforming ideas into action and creating a livable communities movement to improve individuals’ quality of life throughout our region’s many communities.

Trailnet’s Livable St. Louis Conference will channel regional and national ideas/efforts to spark action. The agenda includes two plenary speakers, Chris Leinberger from the Brookings Institution and Mayor Chip Johnson from Hernando, Mississippi, as well as breakout sessions on a range of topics related to livability, including the nuts and bolts of bicycle and pedestrian design, transit-oriented development (TOD), access to healthy foods, regional and state efforts, methods for increasing community engagement, and roundtable discussions.

We will measure our success for the day by your degree of inspiration and your take-away of tangible ideas and useful, action-oriented resources.

Additional Background
The conference comes at an important time in our nation’s evolution. For over six decades, American communities have been shaped almost exclusively by the automobile. In our zeal for cars, we forgot about people. The result is communities, from the urban core to rural towns, where children cannot walk to school, seniors cannot live independently, and local economies have dried up.

The tide is shifting. There is a growing national movement to re-connect urban planning, public health, and public policy to create more “livable” communities. The livable communities movement emphasizes the need to break traditional decision-making silos in order to develop coordinated approaches to enhance the communities in which we live and our quality of life. This is a movement being built on collaboration and the very simple notion that we produce better results working together towards shared goals than we do working separately.

The clearest example of this movement is apparent in the new federal Interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities consisting of HUD, DOT, and EPA. The partnership recently published six livability principles that outline this new trans-disciplinary vision for communities, and we are already seeing federal policy priorities and funding priorities shifting to fit the vision.

As a region, we need to be ready to capitalize on these important new federal priorities. We invite you to join us April 30th to learn, share, and engage yourself in the growing livable communities movement in the St. Louis region!