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Jacky Kennedy lives in Toronto, Canada, and was the Founding Director of Canada Walks at Green Communities Canada and has been a long time walking and cycling activist. Jacky became involved in the walk to school movement in 1996 as a parent concerned about the traffic safety at her son’s school, herself contributing as a driving working Mom! Over the next 18 years Jacky championed the Active & Safe Routes to School initiative in Toronto, helping the expansion across Canada through the development and implementation of a Canadian School Travel Planning model. Jacky was instrumental in bringing the prestigious Walk21 international conference series to Canada for the first time in 2007 to Toronto, leading to the creation of a series of Walkability Roadshows and the creation of Canada Walks in 2009. Prior to her retirement in December 2016, Jacky worked to ensure the sustainability of School Travel Planning in Canada and continues to provide expert guidance to this work.

Over the course of her 20 years advocating for walking and walkable communities in Canada, Jacky has observed a marked shift in attitudes and behaviours with many more people adopting active human-powered mobility for many of their shorter daily trips and municipalities across Canada developing pedestrian plans and prioritizing children’s mobility.  This will mean an increasing proportion of local government spend will be for improving pedestrian infrastructure.
The interview took place beside the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London in May 2008.27’32” 12.9 MB

Download notes of items mentioned in this episode: Jacky_Kennedy

In October 2013, Jacky made a 5 year walking forecast, you can listen to it here

What has Jacky done since our interview and what has happened in Canada

“Walkability roadshows conducted across Canada in 2009 and 2011;  in Alberta we held 5 community workshops and trained Alberta Health Services to deliver them, which they continue to do and presented on at Walk21 in Calgary in 2017.

Walk21 Vancouver 2011; Walk21 Calgary 2017 – Advisor to both.

Development of the WALK Friendly Communities designation program http://walkfriendly.ca. See the Showcase document for the communities awarded designation to date: http://canadawalks.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/WFO-Showcase.pdf.

ASRTS:
In 2010-12 GCC had three years of funding from Canadian Partnership Against Cancer. To develop a Canadian School Travel Planning model and implement it in every province and territory, getting new programs off the ground and helping to strengthen existing ones. That work has continued through today with so many incredible successes: http://www.saferoutestoschool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/CLASP-2012-National-Results.pdf.

Today the ASRTS program in Ontario is moving to a very sustainable level with 3 years of funding to work with school districts to implement school travel planning. An example of how this came to be was work I directed with Heart & Stroke Foundation resulting in this report: http://www.saferoutestoschool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Active-School-Travel-Provincial-Priorities-Report.pdf. Ontario government has now provided funding to GCC to greatly expand the STP model.

There’s lots of detail on how STP has evolved in Canada here: http://www.saferoutestoschool.ca/school-travel-planning/

I led GCC’s work with University of Toronto on several ASRTS and STP research initiatives, and one on cost-effectiveness of STP is covered in the book: Walking: Connecting Sustainable Transport with Health; Edited by Corinne Mulley, Klaus Gebel and Ding Ding; Emerald Publishing – Chapter 6 Walkng To and From School (me and George Mammen, PhD).”

Jacky retired at the end of 2016 but continues to provide advice and guidance on sustainable and active transportation.

Listen to Jacky Kennedy’s 20×20 Vision of walking in 2040