Kelly-Marie Rodgers joins GreaterSport to help get Greater Manchester moving

By GreaterSport | 12 October 2022 | TAGS: health, healthy active places, neighbourhoods, Public Practice, Kelly-Marie Rodgers

GreaterSport is delighted to welcome Kelly-Marie Rodgers to their team on a 12-month Public Practice Associate placement as Strategic Lead for Healthy and Active Places.

Kelly has spent seven years qualifying and working as an architect at Hawkins\Brown where her work has shaped places to ensure the physical environment has a positive effect on physical and mental health.

Her new role will see her work with design teams to create more active and healthier places across Greater Manchester by spreading and growing good practice.

The creation of active, healthy places is key to people growing up, getting on and growing old in a greener, fairer, more prosperous city region.

Every year, people in Greater Manchester make around 200 million car journeys shorter than one kilometre – the equivalent of a 15-minute walk or a five-minute bike ride.

Designing places which enable everyday physical activity is key to helping people to live more active, healthy lives.

Public Practice is a not-for-profit social enterprise with a mission to rebuild skills and capacity in the public sector to help improve places and communities across England.

Rodgers is part of their first ever cohort of public sector placements in the north of England, thanks to a £200,000 investment by Homes England supported by the Department of Levelling Up, Homes and Communities (DLUHC).

Strategic Lead for Healthy and Active Places Kelly Rodgers said:

“Throughout my career I have been very fortunate to work with a number of clients who understand the value of creating human centric spaces.

“Often the building blocks of healthy placemaking have been embedded within the aspiration of the projects I have worked on.

“However, the central focus of those projects has not always been health but incorporating the ingredients of healthy placemaking into ‘good design’.

“By putting health at the centre of our placemaking strategy in Greater Manchester we can focus urban designers on bringing these ingredients together to ensure we deliver places which enable communities to be more active and in doing so improve the health of generations of people in Greater Manchester.

“In a post Covid world the need to put health at the centre of our built environment is much clearer to us all.

“I’m excited to have the opportunity, through the Public Practice programme, to contribute to the growing movement of healthy placemaking.”

Eve Holt, Director at GreaterSport, said:

“We are committed in Greater Manchester to creating the conditions for good and active lives for all.  This includes the design and development of safe, inclusive, joyful physical environments which invite people to move every day.  

“A Public Practice placement provides a brilliant way for us to increase our expertise and capacity to help lead on this work so we can spread and grow good practice. 

“I'm very excited about welcoming Kelly to the GreaterSport team and the GM family as a Strategic Lead for Healthy Active Places.”

Pooja Agrawal, CEO of Public Practice said:

“It’s heart-warming to help place Kelly in this exciting new role as part of our first ever cohort of built environment professionals in local government in the north of England and our largest-ever cohort across the country.

“We were really excited to help GreaterSport find Kelly to work on this innovative strategy which will help to create healthier places and more active neighbourhoods for millions of people who live, work and visit Greater Manchester.”