Active Exercise for ‘City of Health’ : Wellness: Duarte is one of seven cities chosen by the state. A Wellness Guide of health resources will be distributed to all residents.

The city of Duarte, whose motto is “City of Health,” has been selected by the state as the testing ground for a new Wellness Guide.

A prototype of the guide, developed in a joint effort by the Office of Prevention of the state Department of Mental Health and UC Berkeley, was introduced Wednesday at a public health conference in Los Angeles. Duarte is scheduled to start distributing the guides to the city’s 8,000 households June 9.

Produced by the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley, the resource guide covers a broad range of health-related topics, including pregnancy, child care, physical fitness and aging. The four-year program has a budget of $600,000, state officials said.

Duarte was chosen by the state as a pilot city because of its involvement in the “Healthy Cities Project,” introduced last year by UC Berkeley and the state Department of Health Services to promote community health projects.

All cities in the state were asked to come up with project proposals. Ten cities sent in full applications. The state selected seven of them, including Duarte, to receive technical guidance from state officials in developing their projects.

Duarte’s proposal was to develop a health resource directory to be distributed to all city residents. The city is putting together the guide now for distribution in the fall. Officials say it will complement the Wellness Guide by providing more local information.

“Not only were we excited about Duarte’s project, but we thought, ‘What an ideal place to test our Wellness Guide,’ ” said Charles Roppel, chief of the state’s Office of Prevention. “They were very eager to help in any way they could.”

Using anecdotes, photographs and illustrations, the Wellness Guide shows people how to deal with health issues such as depression, teen-age pregnancy, caring for the elderly, and drug and alcohol abuse. The guide also discusses ways of finding community support networks.

Each section of the guide offers toll-free 800 numbers for crisis and support networks. The producers of the guide have also been working with telephone companies and directory publishers, including Pacific Bell, GTE and the Hispanic Yellow Pages, to standardize the community service listings in local Yellow Pages so they match the Wellness Guide’s page-by-page listings.

“This is the first of its kind in the universe,” said Dr. Linda Neuhauser, UC Berkeley’s evaluation director for the guide. “We’re hoping that this will be a catalyst for health education throughout the state by sending out the message that a healthy lifestyle starts at home.”

Program officials intend to distribute the free, 80-page guide to every household in the state by 1991. Before that deadline, Duarte will serve as a pilot city to research the best methods of distribution and to assess the public’s impressions of the guide.

“We were notified of our selection about six months ago, and ever since then, we’ve been working on this nonstop,” said Terry Fitzgerald, Duarte’s coordinator for the Wellness Guide. “We want people to recognize the value of the guide, and not think that it’s just an advertisement.”

Officials in Duarte, which has a population of 22,000, have rounded up about 50 community volunteers who will hand-deliver half of the guides to 4,000 homes. The other half will be mailed to residents to determine which method of distribution works better.

“For the past few months, I’ve been going to different clubs and organizations, church groups, schools and businesses, trying to recruit volunteers,” said Sue Lawrence, Duarte’s director of volunteers. “A lot of seniors who are in walking clubs said they will deliver the guides in the neighborhoods that they walk in.”

The guide, which will be available in English and Spanish, will be packaged with a short letter from the city, an evaluation form to mail back and a six-page mini-telephone book of local health and social service providers printed by GTE. The numbers in the mini-book will also appear in the community access section of the regular GTE phone book when it is published in December.