But perhaps the biggest overall achievement of the Vitality Project, according to city manager Victoria Simonsen, has been "a new sense of connection in our town, a mutual support system that we didn't have before."

A New Center

At the celebration, Albert Lea officially pledged to keep the experiment going by continuing the Vitality Project initiatives and establishing a Vitality Center in the heart of downtown. Victoria announced the new measures and accepted two $10,000 grants in support of them, from AARP and United Health Foundation.

"There were 18 different initiatives in the Vitality Project," she says, "from the walking school buses to the restaurant project to the cooking classes. Every single one has expressed a desire to continue." A Vitality Team made up of representatives of community stakeholders—the school system, chamber of commerce, city government, and other groups—will oversee the continuing initiatives, and the Vitality Center will be the place to go to sign up for classes and other activities and to take the Vitality Compass.

"We're going to be calling on volunteers to fix up the building and to help us with all phases of the center," says Victoria. "We have a little spot in the lower level of city hall where our library foundation runs a used book store. They have two volunteers there—every day of the week, nine to three—and it's been very successful. We thought, 'If we can do that for used books, think what we can do for a project like this, with all the people who've been involved already.' "

A Proud Town

The eventual goal is for Albert Lea to become a place where other communities can learn how to make the same kind of commitment to health, longevity, and human connection that Albert Lea has made.

"This town is proud of what it's been able to achieve," says Victoria, "but it still comes down to individual lives. At the kickoff of the Project, some people were questioning our goal of adding two years of longevity to our lives. Two years doesn't sound like much, they said. Well, I was at the podium with my two daughters, and I said that two more years with these girls was well worth making a few changes in my life. I took the Vitality Compass for the second time the other day, and I found that I had added 13 years. That means I might get to see a grandbaby grow up. That's the essence of what this experience means to me."

"People know that they should eat better," she says. "Everybody's getting nutrition information all the time—from TV, from books, from their grandparents, from who knows where else. It can be totally overwhelming. What people want are some specifics, something tangible to do that relates to how they really live."

Little Blue Signs

Early on in the Vitality Project, she met with our nutrition expert, Leslie Lytle, and our health initiatives director, Joel Spoonheim, to make sure that the healthiest foods were easy to find in the Hy-Vee aisles. Soon Albert Leans were spotting the little blue signs near the dark-green vegetables, the nuts, and the other items on our Longevity Foods list.

Amy wrote a biweekly column in the Albert Lea Tribune introducing and "profiling" Longevity Foods. And for 13 weeks she taught our very popular Monday-night cooking classes: Beans, Beans, the Magical Fruit concentrated on legumes; Let's Salsa showed cooks how to whip up tangy fruit and vegetable condiments; Fruit and Veggie Frenzy highlighted ways to jazz up our two favorite types of food. "And for It's Grillin' Time, I took the class out to Edgewater Park, where we brought our trailer-size Hy-Vee grill," says Amy. "We grilled all kinds of things that are not meat—fruits, vegetables, and even artichoke and eggplant pizza."

Amy concentrated on making the recipes she presented "practical, easy, and tasty," as she puts it—dishes that don't require hard-to-find ingredients or complicated cooking processes. "And I think I surprised a lot of people who initially thought vegetables are dull with just how delicious they can be."

Get Realistic

For Amy, as for the Vitality Project, the key to eating better is being realistic and making small, gradual changes—not plunging into drastic makeovers. "If you want to eat more fruit and veg," she says, "take a look at how often you eat them right now—three times a week?—and decide to increase it to four or five. Do you snack at two o'clock on a sugary energy bar? Try replacing it with nuts or fruit. Can you reduce your meat-eating by half?" Small changes add up, Amy points out, and the best approach is to practice a small thing until it becomes a habit—and then go to the next thing. To which we at Blue Zones can only say, "Amen."

Like most municipal officials in America, Mike has been struggling with a shrinking budget. While lack of state aid killed one Vitality Project-inspired proposal for more sidewalks in a commercial area, the city's budget had some money set aside for filling in missing sidewalks elsewhere in Albert Lea. "What the presence of the Project did, I think, was encourage us to go ahead and spend that money, make those changes in tough times, rather than wait," Mike says.

The Work Goes On

Which goes to show how supportive the mayor and other community leaders have been of the Project since its inception. Mike is particularly impressed with how much civic cooperation the Project has inspired. "I have taken a lot of pains to point out to people that the Albert Lea side of the project is about a lot more than just city government," he says. "The school system, the medical center, and many other elements of our community have worked with the city to make this go. The core group of volunteers has been working very, very hard on everything, and if there have been 'turf wars' over who does what, I certainly haven't heard about them."

And what about the mayor's own experience of the Project? "It's been great to realize there are some simple things you can do for your health that can have a dramatic effect," he says, "and helpful to have these reminders from Okinawa and Sardinia and other places where people just do them as a matter of course. It shows that you don't need fancy diets, and you can be healthier without 'working at it.' "

He says that he's been walking more and eating more vegetables. "But there's one thing I've slacked off on," he adds. "I took the Vitality Compass test the second time, and where it asked if I'd eaten any seafood in the last month, I had to say no. I like seafood, I know it's good for me, but I just don't have the habit of eating it yet. It'll take time, but I think I'll get there."

Even though the Vitality Project is about to end officially, Mike says he and the community will continue to work on the ideas and habits it has introduced. "We would like this community to be the place where other towns come for help on how to do something similar," says Mike. "And we very much want to keep the momentum going within Albert Lea too. We don't want to lose what we've learned."

For more on the town's plans for the future, visit this space on Friday, when we will be talking with City Manager Victoria Simonsen.

Several Albert Leans who created or improved their home gardens in the last few months told us that the work brought their families closer. And community gardens give people a chance to expand their social circle by gardening right next to neighbors or strangers—another Vitality Project plus. It can be relatively easy to get a community garden going in many neighborhoods and towns.

A Second Garden

Jenny Davis, the supervisor of recreation programs for the Albert Lea Department of Parks and Recreation, told us that the city already had one community garden before we came to town, at Brookside Park on the north side. But Jenny is on the Project's leadership team, and she had felt pretty sure that after the Vitality Project began, there would be a demand for more plots. So even before our kickoff event in May, she and her team at the parks department had opened up another green space, in southwest Albert Lea. "The area had been a community garden years ago but had fallen out of use," she says. "Our parks department guys plowed the land, and county inmates on the Sentenced to Serve work-release program laid out 20 plots." After the Vitality Project kickoff, "We got a lot of requests," she says, "and we rushed to plot out 26 more." Jenny and her team have been scouting out other sites since.

"It's been fun to drive by the gardens and see the variety of things growing there," she says. "Somebody might have a full plot of sweet corn right next to somebody else's tomato patch. And there was a garden of sunflowers at Brookside that really stood out."

Starting Your Own Community Garden

If there's a community garden in your city, it's more than likely run by your parks department, and you can apply to them for a plot. Typically, there's a modest rental fee for one summer's use, and you renew each summer by a specified deadline.

If you'd like to get a community garden started, the parks department is also your first stop. "Ask them what areas of town have city-owned land that could be developed into a garden," Jenny advises. "And then the most important thing to show them is that people will actually use the garden. We hate to plow and plot land and then see it sit vacant." Take a survey of your neighbors and friends and sign up as many of them as possible. "Once you've proven interest, it's usually not a big undertaking to get the garden started," she says.

The deadline for Albert Lea community gardeners to dig up and close out their plots for the winter is this Thursday. But we're sure that when spring finally returns to Minnesota, the healthful and beautiful vegetables will be back—and maybe the sunflowers too.

Rules of the Road

"Walkability has to do with whatever makes walking the easy, natural, and enjoyable thing to do," says Dan. His specialty is helping communities make the physical changes needed to enhance walkability, and he had a number of recommendations for Albert Lea. They included adding more sidewalks, completing a walking trail all the way around Fountain Lake—the beautiful lake is a favorite environment for local walkers—and adding bike lanes. He even suggested putting certain routes on a "road diet" by eliminating lanes—multilane streets encourage drivers to go faster, making crosswalks more dangerous to pedestrians and reinforcing the idea that cars are the kings of the road.

Dan's reasons and tactics for promoting walkability are many and compelling. In the Project, of course, we're most interested in how walking can enhance health. "Walking is the easiest and most natural way to promote health," says Dan. "The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates called it humanity's best medicine. Job one in changing a town's infrastructure is adding places to walk, like sidewalks and trails."

Just as important, however, is "calming" auto traffic. That's why Dan advocates eliminating traffic lanes. "The combination of speed and noise intimidates walkers," he says, adding that while the automobile has given us many gifts, "it's also spread our lives out so that our schools, our parks, our shopping districts are no longer in convenient places—places we can walk to."

Dan also recommended that Albert Lea add more trees downtown and landscape streets in more appealing ways, so that pedestrians actually enjoy the scenery when they're outdoors and on foot.

Life on the Ground

Ultimately, says Dan, changes like the ones he recommends go well beyond promoting the health of individuals. The walkability of our communities is tightly bound up with their economic and social health.

"Designing around the human foot tends to create sustainable, supportable communities that thrive economically," he says. "And we need walking as a natural way for children to learn the rules of life—to learn whom to trust, how to make friends, and a lot more. In fact, walking—encountering people, interacting with them face-to-face—teaches all of us many things we would not learn if we weren't out there participating in life on the ground.

"The reaction to my ideas from the people of Albert Lea was overwhelmingly positive," says Dan. "And even those who were skeptical about the road diet—eliminating traffic lanes does seem like a step backward to some folks—were open to my reasons for advocating it."

Later in the week we'll see how the city is officially adopting Dan's ideas.