Long-range planning involves many individuals who work in a variety of institutions, agencies, and organizations across a wide range of sectors. The information in this guide is relevant to all of these individuals. However, the primary audience for this guide is planning decisionmakers in local and regional government as well as the experts that these decisionmakers consult to support their work. Some strategies in this guide fall comfortably within standard planning practice. Other strategies will push against the edges of your practice or beyond, and implementing them effectively will require partnerships with other sectors. Community sizes and contexts across the country range from small, sparsely populated rural communities to large, densely populated urban global hubs. This guide provides information that applies to all types of community sizes and contexts. However, the guide is primarily intended to be relevant in small to medium-sized communities with populations of 20,000 to 350,000 people. Over 50% of the US population lives in communities of this size, and many of these communities are experiencing the challenges addressed in this guide. This guide is also relevant in counties or regions with a range of community sizes, as well as in neighborhoods that have higher rates of poverty, higher percentages of people of color, or higher rates of poor health outcomes than the large cities they are part of.

We hope that the guidance in this resource will help local governments across the country promote the health and well-being of all their residents through long-range planning. This primer will help you promote health equity in your community by using several approaches:
1. Understand and explain the power of planning to create healthy, prosperous, equitable communities. This primer provides an overview of the wide range of ways that planning can support or impede health equity (and has done so in the past).
2. Use planning and health concepts to build, maintain, and protect systems and environments that encourage healthy living for everyone. This primer presents frameworks you can use in your long-range plans to align health equity policies across all the interconnected aspects of your community.
3. Integrate health and equity into your everyday practice and decisionmaking, using a set of practical tools.
4. Make sure your long-range plans achieve their intended health, equity, and prosperity results. This primer introduces you to essential actions that support implementation and explains potential barriers to equitable implementation.

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