Opening Spaces: An Exciting Accessibility Effort Bookends 2024

By Elanah Sherman

Featured Image: Chad Frost of Kent + Frost Landscape Architects presents the plan

 

The year 2024, the third year of Avalonia’s ongoing accessibility initiative, was bookended by efforts to establish a highly accessible trail at Cedar Wood Preserve in Norwich. This trail will meet or exceed the standards of the Forest Service Trail Accessibility Guidelines and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Early in the year, we applied for a $32,500 design grant from the state’s Recreational Trails Grants Program. Before submitting the application, we held a public forum at Otis Library in Norwich to solicit initial ideas, all of which contributed to the application narrative.

After receiving a maximum percentage award of $26,000 (the balance later obtained through donation), we contracted with Chad Frost of Kent + Frost Landscape Architects for design services. Chad brings not only technical and aesthetic expertise to the project, but a sensitivity to disability grounded in his own family’s experience.

 

 

 

 

 

On December 6, we held a second public forum at the same location, during which Chad presented his provisional design. Attendees, several of whom have disabilities, provided feedback on many aspects of the design and expressed enormous enthusiasm for the project. Especially notable to members of the audience were the plan’s attention to people with many different kinds of disabilities, including sensory and cognitive, and the design’s incorporation of multiple variations of experience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mayor Nystrom recognizes the importance of balancing different kinds of development in distressed cities, saying:  “I look forward to building more partnerships with Avalonia to protect sensitive areas of the City. Such partnerships help provide important balance to other kinds of important development projects.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are now preparing another submission to the same funding source, this time for implementation. The finished trail design, which will constitute the crown jewel of the application, will contain or reflect most of the suggestions made during the December forum.

This project is noteworthy not only because of its all-encompassing accessibility framework, but because the site is in a designated distressed municipality. Land trust properties are a rare presence in those parts of the State, which are too often denigrated and dismissed. To the contrary, Avalonia has made a concerted effort over the years to bring new life, consciousness, and environmental health to struggling cities and towns.

On to 2025, and continuing efforts to ‘open the open’ to everyone!