What do we mean by equity?

Equity recognizes that different people have different barriers to living healthy, fulfilled lives. To help people get to the same outcome, we need to understand the different barriers and opportunities that affect different groups and craft our approach with those challenges and needs in mind. Equity addresses the power imbalances and the lived differences that create different health, educational, and career outcomes for different people– differences that often emerge along lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, and disability.

Equity is different than equality.

Equality can be understood as giving everyone the same thing, while equity means ensuring each person has access to what they need to thrive. For example, equality has been described as giving everyone a pair of shoes, while equity is making sure they have shoes that fit.

What does it mean to include equity in Safe Routes to School?

To help address inequities and increase service in low-income and communities of color, the Safe Routes to School program prioritizes Equity as one of its 6 E’s. Equity needs to be built into each aspect of a comprehensive Safe Routes to School initiative, meaning that each E needs to include equity in its analysis and action items. But equity also needs to be considered separately to ensure that the overall effects of individual steps are adding up to a meaningful and sufficient investment in the safety and health of low-income students, students of color, and others.

Here is a quick summary of the Six E’s (key components of a comprehensive Safe Routes to School Program) with a brief review of what might be included under each E to integrate equity:

Equity

Ensuring that Safe Routes to School initiatives are benefiting all demographic groups, with particular attention to ensuring safe, healthy, and fair outcomes for students with disabilities, low-income students, Native American students, students of color, female students, LGBTQ students, students whose families speak a language other than English, homeless students, and other demographic groups.

Education

Teaching students and community members about the broad range of transportation choices, and making sure they have the skills and know-how to be safe from traffic and crime while walking, bicycling, and using public transportation.  Ensuring that education efforts address equity means assessing whether the people receiving the education services reflect the larger demographic pattern in the community, region, or state, and whether the content and lessons are engaging and useful for all student groups.

Encouragement

Using events and activities to promote walking, bicycling, public transportation, and physical activity.  Encouragement activities can include new partnerships with faith-based groups, civil rights and neighborhood coalitions, and tenants’ organizations, as they build activities like walking school buses, walk to school events, bicycling incentives, and art and active transportation events.  Addressing equity in encouragement means ensuring that encouragement activities are available to low-income students and students of color, as well as designing them to overcome the variety of obstacles to walking and bicycling that different kids experience.  Encouragement activities should effectively influence children from different backgrounds to embrace walking and bicycling.

Engineering

Making physical improvements to the streetscape and built environment that decrease the risk of injury from motor vehicles and discourage crime and violence, increasing street safety for all.  Equity requires community engagement and means that policies and investments ensure that physical improvements address street safety in low-income communities and communities of color, where sidewalks, bike lanes, lighting, and other safety features are often absent.

Encouragement

All Safe Routes to School initiatives should begin by listening to students, families, teachers, and school leaders and working with existing community organizations, and build intentional, ongoing engagement opportunities into the program structure.

Evaluation

Assessing which approaches are more or less successful; ensuring that a program or initiative is decreasing health disparities and increasing equity; and identifying unintended consequences or opportunities to improve the effectiveness of an approach for a given community.