Small Communities, Big Challenges

To gain a better understanding of environmental and public health challenges facing rural communities, EPA and our partners are launching the “Small Communities, Big Challenges” Competition. The goal of this Competition is for local governments to identify innovative and effective ways to holistically engage rural communities around environmental health issues and to identify any associated barriers to better protecting human health. Through increased engagement, this Competition would ideally help local governments and communities better identify and understand rural community-based environmental public health issues, which may help in the protection of the community’s environmental public health. EPA and our partners will use the solutions from this Competition to learn of unique or innovative strategies for engaging with rural communities and of the environmental public health issues that rural communities are faced with. Local governments that participate in the Competition will demonstrate their innovative strategies for engaging rural communities and present collaboratively identified findings from these engagements through a brief engagement strategy report and a short video.