In the first seminar of the “Measuring Community Change” series, Liz Weaver and Lidia Kemeny discuss Vital Signs. Vital Signs is one approach contained in metrics papers developed by Vibrant Communities as part of the Ontario Trillium Foundation’s Community Capacity Series.
Learning Objective:
To become familiar with an example of a measurement approach to determine if citizen engagement, collaboration and vibrancy is increasing in a community.
Lidia Kemeny - Lidia Kemeny is the Vancouver Foundation’s Director for Partnerships & Projects in the department of Granting & Community Initiatives. She holds a Master’s degree in Health Promotion from Dalhousie University and her professional background includes extensive experience working with funding partners, community organizations, donors, research entities, government, business and civic organizations.
Before joining the Vancouver Foundation, she spent 16 years as the Executive Director of SafeStart, a provincial injury prevention program, and as the Director of Child Health Advocacy, both for the BC Children’s Hospital. Prior to moving to BC, she was the national Media Director for ParticipACTION, and the National Project Director of the Ontario Public Health Association’s National Literacy and Health Project.
Liz Weaver - Liz Weaver, Lead Coach of the Vibrant Communities Canada team, provides coaching, leadership and support to Ontario community partners, including Opportunities Waterloo Region and the Hamilton Roundtable on Poverty Reduction. As lead coach, she helps initiatives develop their frameworks of change, supports and guides their projects and helps connect them to Vibrant Communities and other comprehensive community collaborations. Read more here.
Vital Signs is an annual check-up conducted by community foundations across Canada that measures the vitality of communities, identifies trends, and shares opportunities for action in at least ten areas critical to quality of life. Lidia explained that the Vancouver Foundation finds that the Vital Signs process:
Informs the foundation’s strategic priorities
Positions the Vancouver Foundation as a resource for knowledge
Helps the foundation engage, inform and stimulate community dialogue
In this clip, Lidia explains what Vital Signs measures and how community foundations across Canada are involved.
Communities choose the areas they want to measure from two sources:
Areas that are common across Canada, set by Community Foundations of Canada, to allow for comparison between communities
Factors that are unique to a specific region
By engaging citizen ‘graders’ as well as hard data, Vital Signs in Vancouver looks at both facts and how people’s perceptions measure up to reality. The foundation believes that helpful conversations start when communities begin to explore the gaps between the facts (e.g. hard data like crime statistics) and peoples’ perception about crime.
Lidia points out that it takes a lot of resources for communities to get data, and most organizations focus solely on one issue. The role of the Vancouver Foundation is to look at the whole community and how one issue affects another. Vital Signs reports are different because they provide cross-cutting data about a whole community.
In this clip, Lidia highlights how issues interconnect. She uses the example of affordable housing to show how it has a ripple effect that influences transport, environment, personal health and civic engagement.
One of the goals of Vital Signs is to stimulate engagement and community dialogue. In Vancouver, the report was distributed in partnership with the Vancouver Sun, a local newspaper, and a Chinese version was also available. In addition to the changing demographics of the community, specific indicators in Vancouver have included belonging and leadership and food security. Vital Signs is helping the city build toward a shared community agenda.
The Vancouver Foundation had received feedback that Vital Signs did not adequately reflect the varied experience of different demographic groups. The foundation’s youth council, for example, felt that their views were not represented.
In 2009, the foundation conducted a youth-led Vital Signs process. As expected, the process resulted in more involvement and influence from youth, but surprisingly, there was not as much difference between the perceptions of youth and the perceptions of the broader community as anticipated. However, the involvement of the youth resulted in huge interest from media and from municipal councils.. The decision to have a youth-led report led to new and unique opportunities for youth to be heard.
The lesson was that there were benefits to looking at data and perceptions from the perspective of specific demographic groups. Lidia explained that the Foundation is now interested at looking at the experience of seniors, disabled, and new immigrant communities.
Lidia pointed out some of the challenges that Vital Signs faces.
It is difficult to get current data, especially new data for an annual report.
Hard data does not tell the whole story. People’s beliefs become their reality, so you need to bridge from the realm of perception with data that has integrity and accuracy.
More people increasingly want to contribute to community indicators, which is a both a challenge and an opportunity.
No one likes bad news. Presenting facts that may be negative or discomforting needs to be done in way that is impartial and credible.
In this clip, Lidia talks about the resources that go into producing the Vital Signs report.
Lidia explained that as Vital Signs grow, there is a growing interest and need to know what’s happening across the country and to learn from each other. In Vancouver, they are interested in pulling out and comparing data by municipality within Metro Vancouver, and in comparing that data with other municipalities of similar size. Municipal structures are often the place where action can start to address the indicators.
Lidia admitted that there is also a growing desire to have assets based indicators rather than deficit based indicators.
She explained that social media is transforming how they engage people. Here, she explains how youth used text messages to gather 4000 responses in one day.
Less Poverty – While poverty in communities is often measured through income rates or percentages of low income households, broader measures include elements such as social inclusion, community development and well-being. This paper provides an overview of different approaches which organizations and governments have used to measure “less poverty”. Access the paper here.
More Vibrant Communities - Some community wellbeing indicator systems look across a broad selection of domains to provide a holistic approach with the potential for more complete picture of a community. This paper provides an overview of different approaches which organizations and governments have used to measure “more vibrant communities”. Access the paper here.
Vancouver Foundation - The Vancouver Foundation is the largest of Canada's 160 community foundations. Information on Metro Vancouver's Vital Signs report is here.
Youth Vital Signs 2009 - This site, also titled “i am Vancouver” contains the youth focused Vital Signs report and describes the mobile text survey mentioned in the seminar. Access the website here.
In the first seminar of the “Measuring Community Change” series, Liz Weaver and Lidia Kemeny discuss Vital Signs. Vital Signs is one approach contained in metrics papers developed by Vibrant Communities as part of the Ontario Trillium Foundation’s Community Capacity Series. 
Lidia Kemeny - Lidia Kemeny is the Vancouver Foundation’s Director for Partnerships & Projects in the department of Granting & Community Initiatives. She holds a Master’s degree in Health Promotion from Dalhousie University and her professional background includes extensive experience working with funding partners, community organizations, donors, research entities, government, business and civic organizations. 
Liz Weaver - Liz Weaver, Lead Coach of the Vibrant Communities Canada team, provides coaching, leadership and support to Ontario community partners, including Opportunities Waterloo Region and the Hamilton Roundtable on Poverty Reduction. As lead coach, she helps initiatives develop their frameworks of change, supports and guides their projects and helps connect them to Vibrant Communities and other comprehensive community collaborations. 
