The America's Healthiest City Podcast Is Back — Now on Channel RVA With New Interactive Features
By Will Melton · March 7, 2026 · 4 min read read
Category: Health & Wellness
Show: Americas Healthiest City
After a hiatus that ended with one of Richmond's most consequential conversations, the show returns with a new home, new tools for listeners, and an open call for the leaders driving change.
The America's Healthiest City podcast is returning to the airwaves — and this time, it has a new home on Channel RVA, where listeners and viewers can engage with episodes in ways that weren't possible before.
Hosted by Xponent21 founder and CEO Will Melton, the show has spent more than 90 episodes exploring what it would actually take to make Richmond the healthiest city in America — not just in terms of hospitals and doctor visits, but across the full spectrum of community health: housing, food access, economic opportunity, mental health, public safety, infrastructure, and the social fabric that ties it all together.
The podcast went on hiatus following one of its most significant episodes: a deep conversation with Mayor Dr. Danny Avula about Richmond's water crisis — the infrastructure failure that struck just days after he took office in January 2024 and disrupted water service for nearly half a million residents across the region. In that episode, Avula spoke candidly about the decades of deferred maintenance behind the crisis, the hard lessons learned, and his vision for connecting infrastructure investment to Richmond's longer-term goal of becoming a genuinely healthy city. It was a fitting place to pause. It's also a fitting place to pick back up.
A New Home, New Ways to Engage
The show's return to Channel RVA isn't just a change of address. Episodes are now available with interactive features that let audiences engage as they watch or listen — whether you're tuning in live, catching a recent episode, or exploring the archive.
New episodes will land directly in subscribers' inboxes as soon as they're published. If you want to stay current on Richmond's civic health conversation, subscribe here to get each new episode delivered to you.
What the Show Is — and Why It Matters
America's Healthiest City is built on a simple but ambitious premise: that Richmond can become the healthiest city in America by 2033, and that getting there requires honest, ongoing conversation between the people working to make it happen.
Each episode features local leaders — from nonprofits, government, healthcare, business, and academia — sharing what they're seeing on the ground, what's working, and what still needs to change. Past guests have included members of Mayor Avula's transition team focused on housing equity, workforce development leaders, entrepreneurs reshaping Jackson Ward, and health innovators bringing clinical tools to everyday residents.
The common thread is the social determinants of health: the conditions outside the doctor's office that determine whether people in Richmond live long, healthy, connected lives — or don't.
An Open Call for Guests
The podcast is actively seeking guests for the new season — specifically leaders who are doing the hard, on-the-ground work of moving Richmond's health metrics in the right direction.
If you or someone you know is working to address social determinants of health in Richmond — whether through housing, food access, mental health, workforce development, public safety, economic mobility, environmental quality, or civic infrastructure — we want to hear from you.
This is a platform built for practitioners and changemakers, not press releases. The conversations that have the most impact are the ones where someone who knows the work inside-out gets the space to explain what's actually happening and what Richmond needs to do next.
To inquire about being a guest, reach out through the show's guest application.
Stay in the Loop
New episodes are available on Channel RVA and wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe now to get each new episode delivered directly to your inbox when it drops — and join the conversation Richmond has been building toward for years.
America's Healthiest City is a project of Xponent21, the parent company of Channel RVA.