The National Association of Planning Councils’ Leading Social Indicators project examines social indicators from a use perspective, identifying how local communities use social indicators to make changes in their communities. The project built from local NAPC member indicator projects a set of shared indicators that then are measured at the national level as part of national agenda-setting. However, each indicator is firmly rooted in local communities, and “trend-bending” efforts are highlighted as promising practices. The presentation will discuss local-to-national data issues, using community indicators for local change, developing a shared national agenda based on local issues, and the movement of social indicators from measures of organizational effectiveness and program outcomes to measures of community efficiency in moving trendlines and addressing needs.
The Jacksonville Community Council Inc. published its 20 th annual edition of its Quality
of Life Progress Report in 2005. Over time, the community indicator project has become woven into a model for community change that drives how the indicators are selected and reviewed and how they are marketed and used in the community. The presentation will discuss lessons learned over the last 20 years, including unsuccessful attempts to move the community agenda and subsequent successes in incorporating this community indicator document into the decision-making processes of the community. The presentation will also invite discussion about the next 20 years of community indicators, and where the field is heading. This presentation may be a stand-alone workshop or part of a panel of “old-timer” projects that provides perspective and experience in a growing field. Of particular interest in this workshop will be the opportunity for interested communities who have already developed an indicator set to ask the questions, “Now what?”
Jacksonville Community Council Inc. (JCCI) has measured perceptions of race
relations in the community for 20 years. Perceptions of racial problems differ significantly between people of color and white residents. This indicator led to a 2002 JCCI study, Beyond
the Talk: Improving Race Relations, which called for an annual community accountability report based on indicators of racial disparities across six elements of the quality of life. JCCI engaged a diverse group of citizens to develop the Race Relations Progress Report, which has fundamentally changes the debate about race relations in Jacksonville. A 2001
Harvard/Kaiser/Washington Post survey found not only that perceptions about racial disparities differed by race in America, but also that these perceptions are linked to divergent public policy views. A 2004 JCCI survey found the same results: that perceptions (and misperceptions) about racial disparities drive support for differing public policy. The presentation will discuss how to use indicators of racial disparities to develop shared community understanding/perceptions of problems, changing the debate about race relations and moving toward community consensus on public policy.

Count the Beans, Not the Bucks National Center for Schools and
Communities
Fordham University
In our experience, community organizations and policy advocates tend to reduce the discussion of public school resources to questions of budget. Variations in regional cost structures, however, may limit the usefulness of interstate and interdistrict budget based comparisons. District policy and informal but real administrative and political decisions in many cases sever the relationship between per pupil budget spent and per pupil resources received and thus obscure distributional issues among schools within a district. In the past four and half years, the NCSC has examined resource issues in ten cities across the United
States by relating non-financial indicators as varied as teacher experience and total titles per school library to various academic and behavioral outcomes including test scores, suspensions, and ninth grade retention. This presentation would present examples of nonbudget indicators that illuminate the distribution of resources that frequently have a research-supported relationship to various measures of educational outcomes. Ideally, these examples would stimulate a more general discussion of indicators that help grass roots activists focus policy debate on what the public actually receives in terms of goods and services rather than their often oversimplified price tag.
Valuing and Measuring the ‘Soft Stuff’ in Conservation: An Introduction to
Measures of Health
–
Center for Whole Communities
Land conservation and restoration can be a positive, transformative force in communities.
Conservation’s skill in building and restoring relationships – between white and black, between rich and poor, between people and their health, between people and nature – is the foundation of its ability to create a more durable change in the life of America. One challenge to realizing this potential is how our culture, and the conservation movement, defines success. Look at a newsletter or annual report from almost any land conservation organization in America and you will quickly learn that success is most often measured in terms of acres-saved and dollars-raised. “Acres and dollars” are tangible, cumulative and heroic and have long been a clear and hopeful indicator of conservation victories. But many conservationists – and those with whom they might collaborate – view conservation’s real success as bigger than biological diversity, bigger than sustainable growth, bigger than urban greening, bigger than wilderness designations, and bigger than any narrowly focused ambitions. Conservation’s real success is its ability to re-define for Americans what is meaningful, what is spiritual, what is fair and healthy, and what it means to be a citizen of this country.
But how do we measure these things? Community indicator practitioners have continually demonstrated creativity and determination in developing and reporting indicators that represent, either directly or indirectly, the collective values, goals and desired outcomes expressed by community members though their processes. However, every indicator project

inevitably comes to a point of realization that no data exists for at least some of these important and commonly held values. Like those in the conservation community, they struggle with the challenge of measuring the ‘soft stuff’ that define for us what it really means to have a healthy and vibrant community.
In response to this challenge, the Center for Whole Communities continues to refine and develop a new tool – Measures of Health – for conservation organizations (and others) seeking alternative ways of describing, talking about and tracking over time a more holistic set of values that link environmental and social goals.
Choosing our Future - United Way of Central Oklahoma
In 1994 a strategic analysis of health and human service needs in Central Oklahoma resulted in the publication of Choosing Our Future which defined the strategic needs of children and youth, working-age adults and families, and the elderly in the community. A committee led by Craig Knutson, then Chief Economist of Southwestern Bell developed a set of key indicators for children and youth in Central Oklahoma that focused on economic well-being, academic achievement, health status, and personal safety. The Household Quality of Life
Study, an annual representative sample study of Oklahoma County, evaluates financial security, transportatation accessiblity, elderly citizens’ quality of life, retirement, volunteering, living arrangements, insurance coverage, Medicaid/Medicare, inacessible health services, charitable giving, and arts & cultural events. Combined with information from records and documents of public and private agencies and organizations, these indicators have been maintained and augmented over the past decade providing historical trend information for the community. This information is used by a variety of governmental, civic, and services organizations.
The Vital Signs publication is a bi-annual report of the United Way of Central Oklahoma based on the primary research conducted through the Household Quality of Life Survey and secondary sources in the community.
Using Indicators on Alcohol and Drug Abuse to Galvanize Community
Action
Santa Cruz County, California has one of the oldest community indicator projects in the country. Applied Survey Research (ASR) has conducted the Community Assessment
Project (CAP) for 11 years. The CAP has over 120 indicators for the economy, education, health, public safety, the social environment, and natural environment as well as a telephone survey with county residents. The data has been used to galvanize the county into action in a variety of fields, including teen alcohol and drug use, health care for all children, school readiness, and obesity. In 1995, the CAP showed alarming rates of teen alcohol and drug use, much higher than in the state of California. The CAP data acted as a catalyst in bringing together a coalition of 110 agencies and individuals to develop seven strategies including new laws, public education, a grand jury report, youth

leadership training, referral and home visiting programs, new teen centers and treatment services, and a public policy panel on youth access to alcohol. Since then, subsequent
CAPs have shown consistent decreases in overall alcohol and drug use among 9 th and 11 th grade students. However, data also reveals that as youth age through high school, into college and adulthood, they engage in more binge drinking behavior, where they drink 5 or more drinks within a two hour period. Santa Cruz County is the 6 th worst county in
California for binge drinking rates for residents ages 18-34. The coalition created around teen alcohol and drug use has therefore turned to the topic of binge drinking for youth and adults. The county has received a three-year grant from the California Department of
Alcohol and Drug Programs to provide a needs assessment and identify and implement environmental prevention strategies. ASR is completing the needs assessment using dozens of indicators for youth and adult drinking. The data will be used for community action, public engagement and public policy decisions.
The Greenbook Project: Using Indicators to Improve the Lives of Domestic
Violence Victims and Abused Children
Historically domestic violence and child maltreatment have been treated as two separate problems but researchers have found that 50% of men who frequently abuse their wives, also abuse their children (Peled, E., Jaffe, P., Edelson, J.) As a result of these types of findings, the federal government launched the Greenbook Project to provide effective interventions in cases where families suffer from both domestic violence and child maltreatment. Santa Clara County, California was chosen as one of six pilot Greenbook projects and Applied Survey Research (ASR) is the local research partner evaluating the effort. The focus of the efforts is to improve interventions and coordination between child welfare services, domestic violence agencies, and the juvenile dependency court.
ASR has used a range of indicators to assess the progress of Greenbook, including indicators of co-occurrence of domestic violence and child maltreatment, diversion of cases from child welfare, better information sharing, increased knowledge of staff (from courts, judges, domestic violence advocacy organizations and child welfare), and police activity. The entire Greenbook Project is infused with the respect for diverse communities and cultures. One element of respect for cultures is to develop the awareness of co-occurrence in diverse communities and to this end, ASR has helped to develop data sources at the neighborhood level and county levels and also incorporate data from the state and national levels. ASR has been the leader in the data gathering and management of the Greenbook Project, as well as using the data findings to make changes in the areas of the courts, child welfare and domestic violence advocacy. ASR has also developed new and effective ways of sharing the data with communities, including a Greenbook Jeopardy game.

Using Regional Indicators along with Small Area Data to Communicate
Regional Issues to the General Public through Community Print Media
Communicating regional issues through indicators can be challenging. Most regional indicators do not change rapidly, so they do not typically generate frequent news stories.
In an effort to regularly portray regional issues to the general public, RegionWise, an initiative in St. Louis, Missouri, is crafting a way to communicate regional issues to the community print media. In contrast to major metropolitan newspapers, community print media, is defined as local and neighborhood oriented newspapers. This effort is based on two assumptions: 1) regional indicators become of interest when small area variation is included so people can relate the regional numbers to where they live; and 2) community print media do not have the staff to report on regional issues but are looking for content.
RegionWise provided press release packets to community newspapers that focused on a single indicator or group of related indicators and communicated the status of the indicator at the local level (i.e. county, zip code or precinct). In addition, the packets included academic and professional spokespersons, a human interest story, and directed journalists to the RegionWise web site. This effort generated several front-page articles in rural newspapers and in-depth articles in urban neighborhood papers.
Building Regional Indicators Networks
An exciting development has been ongoing in Florida over the past year—the emergence of a statewide network of Indicators projects, under the leadership of the South Florida
Regional Indicators Project (housed at Florida Atlantic University). This experiment has been underway since 2004 among groups in Florida involved with Indicators reports.
The network was formed from the perspective of the state as a set of diverse regions with different approaches to indicators. Most areas of the state are represented, each with its unique perspective on how regional indicators can be used. These range from community and quality of life to growth management, sustainability and economic development. The network includes representatives from Jacksonville, Orlando, Sarasota, Tampa Bay, and
South Florida. The group has discussed ways in which Florida’s regions might collaborate to identify and measure indicators, secure support from the state, and enhance the quality of life in all of Florida’s regions. It has provided a means to learn from each other and build leadership connections, to share important data sources and identify data gaps, and most importantly, to focus on common needs. One of the goals of the network is to develop common indicators and best practices for the group, which may range from data collection to participation and communication of results. Many positive results of the network, especially coordination of statewide efforts, make it a valuable tool in indicators research.
Time: 30 minutes

Everyone talks about the desire to move indicator projects from reports on trends to the specific actions that will affect those trends, but just like the weather, no one seems to be able to do anything about it.
In this session, we will focus on three to five key obstacles for moving to action and explore the existing experiences within indicator projects that may be able to help move our projects forward. The results from this session can be used by individual participants to improve their own projects as well as by CIC to consider future activities that will help others overcome this set of problems.
In order to carry out this session, we will contact meeting attendees prior to the conference to get a sense of the challenges that individual projects face. From this as a starting point, we will gather some materials from indicator projects that have had some success in moving towards action (such as Santa Monica, Truckee Meadows, and
Jacksonville) to provide a starting point for the discussion.
During the session itself, we will foster a discussion to clearly articulate each of the challenges and then consider how other projects have been able to overcome these hurdles. The concluding discussion will focus on the possible mechanisms that the experiences from other projects can be transferred.
In some cases, the obstacles identified may not have satisfactory examples where indicator projects have been successful. In these cases, we will consider the research and funding needs that might help develop solutions. These will serve as recommendations to
CIC and its associated organizations that have as their mission to provide solutions to challenges in implementing indicator-type projects.
The second in a set of sessions that explores the challenges in fully utilizing indicator projects for managing issues of local importance. In this session, we will explore the difficulty in establishing and using measurement systems for local issues such as success in schools, substance abuse, domestic violence or mass transit. For each of these issues, local governments often spend millions of dollars and yet their progress is not easily measured, nor are measures of progress an important part of the community dialogue regarding future decisions.
In this session, we will focus on three to five key obstacles for moving to accountability and explore the existing experiences within indicator projects that may be able to help move our projects forward. The results from this session can be used by individual participants to improve their own projects as well as by CIC to consider future activities that will help others overcome this set of problems.

In order to carry out this session, we will contact meeting attendees prior to the conference to get a sense of the challenges that individual projects face. From this as a starting point, we will gather some materials from indicator projects that have had some success in moving towards accountability (such as Oregon Benchmarks, New York’s policing or Baltimore’s CitiStats) to provide a starting point for the discussion.
During the session itself, we will foster a discussion to clearly articulate each of the challenges and then consider how other projects have been able to overcome these hurdles. The concluding discussion will focus on the possible mechanisms that the experiences from other projects can be transferred.
Vermont Assoc. for Regional Partnerships
In Vermont, a shift has taken place in the relationship between State government and local communities – a recognition that government programs can only do so much. The
State Agency of Human Services, the Dept. of Education and the 12 regional partnerships have a common purpose - to achieve the 10 outcomes of social well-being. The partnerships are often the only entity in a region that takes responsibility for the "big picture" - they see themselves as the "keepers of the outcomes". Presently they are working on the development of regional report cards which will describe the outcomes and indicators being worked on in each region, who the community partners are, and what strategies are in place to turn the curve for the better. During this session, we will discuss some of the future strategies to help strengthen the Regional Partnerships through the development and use of Report Cards.
Vital Signs: Measuring Social Health
Sarah Eichberg, Project Director
School of Social Work - Adelphi University
Vital Signs is a multi-year, campus community collaborative research project committed to developing a centralized resource for policy makers, service providers and community residents that systematically identifies, assesses and tracks the social health of the people and communities of Long Island. In its first year, Vital Signs is using approximately 40 social indicators to measure health and well-being in Nassau and Suffolk counties, two of the nation’s oldest and most affluent suburbs, undergoing demographic and economic trends that have increased disparities in social health status by race, age, income and geographic location. Vital Signs is currently in the data collection and analysis phase and a social health profile of the Long Island region will be released in the spring.
Vital Signs assumes an ecological approach to understanding and assessing social health.
Within this framework, social health is conceived of as a dynamic, systemic process shaped by interactions across spheres and domains from the macro to the micro levels.
For the Community Indicators Consortium conference, we are interested in discussing the

methodological challenges we have encountered while attempting to use the ecological approach as a guide. Vital Signs/Long Island is a case study to explore such methodological questions/issues as:

What modes of analysis can best be used to capture the complex, interactive relationships among communities and populations?

How can discrete, aggregate data be effectively included in an area profile, given their narrow, abstract and static nature? And what strategies can be employed in the absence of data for specific indicators?

How can community level social health data be used to affect policy when social health is a process influenced (and often constrained) by multi-dimensional and multi-level forces (individual, state, national, global)?
This session will be a structured dialogue session between the Vital Signs project director and project representatives during which the methodological issues raised here can be explored. We see this conversation as relevant to all researchers and policy makers, at all phases of the Project Framework, who are interested in maintaining and improving social health.
City Scan
Connecticut Policy and Economic Council.
In summer 2004, under contract with The Neighborhoods of Hartford, Inc. (NHI), the
Connecticut Policy and Economic Council (CPEC) conducted a comprehensive field inventory of every residential structure within the NHI study area. CPEC designed, programmed and tested a survey instrument deployed on handheld computers. The product includes a 30 point survey of existing external conditions and digital image for each of 1575 properties in the 17 areas covered by the Neighborhoods of Hartford.
The survey data serves as a foundation for a set of parcel-level indicators of market strength for these residential areas. This dataset will assist Neighborhood of Hartford,
Inc. in crafting geographically specific recovery and improvement strategies for the target areas, beginning with a thorough understanding of existing strengths and weaknesses.
This survey is also a benchmark and learning tool to Hartford decision makers to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions in the target areas. Future iterations of the survey will help clarify how the local market conditions have changed from the benchmark survey and what part local interventions may have played in those changes.
You Get What You Measure
®
Yellow Wood Associates, St. Albans, VT
You Get What You Measure® is a powerful framework for project planning and evaluation that directs action toward measurable goals. This 3-hour overview of You Get
What You Measure® is for those who want exposure to an alternative interactive

planning and evaluation process that works. Participants will explore the power of measurement, learn measurement vocabulary, receive an overview of the entire measurement process and have an opportunity to practice identifying goals and indicators. Appropriate application of You Get What You Measure® creates a powerful story for potential funders as well as a dynamic work plan for grant applicants.
Participants should plan on attending the entire three hour session.