Investing in Healthy, Sustainable Places through Urban Agriculture Cities coping with vacant land, food insecurity, and poor food access are increasingly turning to urban agriculture to overcome these and other problems. Authored by Kimberley Hodgson, this paper guides funders from urban agriculture's beginnings to entry points for funding. The paper also highlights examples of places where funder investment has made a difference.

Growing More Affordably: Connecting the Dots on Housing, Energy, and Transportation Costs A team from the Center for Neighborhood Technology describes the relationship between the housing market and markets for energy and transportation and how these markets affect households and the environment. The paper offers funders a perspective on the relationship between housing issues (affordable housing, specifically), transportation and energy use, and environmental impacts and highlights best practices for consideration.

Parks, Public Greenspace, and Smarter Growth: Linking Land and People Kathleen Blaha, formerly of The Trust for Public Land, describes how new strategies that link parks and greenspace with community development, public health, social justice, access, and opportunity are leading to better decisions about how and where communities grow. She describes philanthropic leadership on these issues, and points to eight funder strategies that support the role parks and green space play in building communities.

Urban Forests and Smart Growth Gary Moll and Jeff Olson from American Forests provide a road map and tools for improving urban environments and making cities better places to live by fitting natural resources more effectively into city infrastructure. City trees comprise an urban forest that can be thought of as a city's green infrastructure.

Water and Smart Growth Dana Beach of the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League makes the case that comprehensive land use reform can become the organizing principle of the nation's water quality agenda, suggesting strategies that can be taken at the regional, neighborhood, and site scales to protect aquatic resources.