This blog follows the success story of how Walking College Fellow Armand Turner and Healthy Savannah secured $4 million in funding through the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act to support the construction of Savannah, Georgia’s Tide to Town Trail.
Armand Turner is originally from Gary, Indiana. After college at Indiana State University, he left for jobs in Denver, Colorado; Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas; and Albany, Georgia. He moved to Savannah, Georgia after his wife, an engineer, accepted a job in the historic southern city.
Turner began working as the physical activity program manager at Healthy Savannah, where he focused on encouraging local residents to walk and bike more. He became executive director of the organization in January 2025.
In 2019, the YMCA of Coastal Georgia received a Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health (REACH) grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They collaborated with Healthy Savannah to help improve the health of people in Chatham County, including increasing physical activity. This is how Turner got involved in the Tide to Town project, an idea already decades in the making, to make Savannah more walk- and bike-friendly.
The Tide to Town Trail is a network of walking and biking facilities connecting Savannah and Chatham County that will eventually span 30-plus miles, connecting 62 neighborhoods, 30 schools, three hospitals, and commercial centers through a combination of on-street and separated paths. The project’s name was suggested by John Bennett, a professor at Savannah State University, who wanted it to “represent what Savannah was to many people,” from the urban part of the city to its waterways.
Turner started attending meetings on the project early on in his tenure with Healthy Savannah and saw it as a perfect fit for the organization’s goals. A year later, as a 2020 America Walks Walking College fellow, Turner made the project the subject of his walking action plan, declaring in the opening paragraph that “five years from now, Savannah will be a city connected by walking and biking trails.”
As of 2025, two segments of Tide to Town have been completed along Truman Parkway. A third is expected to be finished in the coming year, bringing the system to a total of seven continuous miles.
Turner is quick to credit the many people and groups involved in the project’s successes, including the Tide to Town nonprofit formed in 2018. But he and his organization have been important in building support for the project in the community and beyond, thanks in large part to the REACH grant that funded community engagement. “Those first five years of REACH, we went into the neighborhoods along the route and talked to community members about barriers, how this could help connectivity,” Turner shared.
It really is amazing. Sometimes it’s surreal to go out to that portion that’s being constructed right now. The work that so many people have come together to make happen … It’s like, ‘What’s next?’
– Armand Turner, Executive Director of Healthy Savannah and America Walks Walking College Fellow
When asked how the community feels about the project, Turner said, “Most people are on board. They like the idea of better sidewalks, better walking infrastructure in their neighborhoods.” There are some, he added, who wonder why these types of facilities are a priority in neighborhoods with so many other pressing needs. The lack of access to grocery stores has been one such priority identified by residents along some sections of the proposed trail.
Turner’s response is always, “‘Why not both?’ We can work on both of those issues at the same time.”
One of the most exciting changes in the five years since Turner joined the Walking College is the growing agreement on the need for the Tide to Trail project. “I think the biggest change from five years ago with this work is the buy-in that we’ve received from the city. We’ve gone from a position where we were trying to convince the city that this is important [to one in which] they’re bought in.”
A few years ago, Turner and others took representatives from Georgia’s two senators’ offices on a bike ride around the city, demonstrating the project’s potential. “They were all for it,” Turner said of the representatives of senators Jon Ossoff’s and Raphael Warnock’s offices. “It’s one thing to look at the website [and another to] really see how logical it is to build trails here.”
Turner can’t be sure that it was the ride that made the difference in getting the project funding through the Infrastructure Bill, but it couldn’t have hurt. “I think it’s all just one additional piece that weighed into that final decision,” he said.
Asked what it was like to have the chance to use facilities that were only conceptual when he first moved to Savannah and to experience the yields of his and others’ hard work first-hand, Turner said, “It really is amazing. Sometimes it’s surreal to go out to that portion that’s being constructed right now. The work that so many people have come together to make happen … It’s like, ‘What’s next?’”
This publication was made possible by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Contract #47QRAA20D003W). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of CDC. These efforts are part of the CDC’s Active People, Healthy NationSM Initiative that is working to help 27 million Americans become more physically active by 2027.
