Vital Signs® is an annual community check-up conducted by community foundations across Canada. It measures the vitality of cities, identifies significant trends, and assigns grades in at least ten areas critical to quality of life. This past October, the Community Foundation of Canada (CFC) released the first national Vital Signs® report to complement the local reports and to add a national picture.

The work is based on Toronto’s Vital Signs®, developed by the Toronto Community Foundation and first published in 2001. In subsequent years, a few other community foundations released reports of their own. Now in 2007, thanks to funding from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, eleven community foundations released local Vital Signs® report cards, including Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Medicine Hat, Red Deer, Sudbury, the Waterloo region, Ottawa, Montréal, Toronto and Saint John. Additional communities like Lethbridge, Saskatoon, Guelph and Fredericton plan to issue reports in 2008.

In this three-part series, we explore the findings of the national and local Vital Signs® reports. In this first installment, we find out the purpose of Vital Signs® and how it is different from other reports. In addition, Monica Patten, executive director of Community Foundations of Canada, gives us a behind the scenes look at the collaboration that went into the 2007 report release.

What is Vital Signs®?

Each community’s report card data is a compilation of numerous research sources (much of it local) to help communities make connections between issues and trends. Each Vital Signs® report investigates ten common indicators (to which community foundations can add specific local information):

• Learning (indicator: proportion of population with completed post-secondary education)
• Work (indicator: unemployment rate)
• Belonging and leadership (indicator: volunteer rate)
• Getting started in our community (indicator: unemployment rate of immigrants)
• Housing (indicator: average housing prices as a proportion of median income)
• Safety (indicator: property crime rate)
• Arts and culture (indicator: employment in cultural industries)
• Health and wellness (indicator: physicians per capita)
• Gap between rich and poor (indicator: overall poverty rate)
• Environment (indicator: greenhouse gas emissions)

The information is very useful for community foundation and other local funders to understand and direct funds toward identified community needs. Moreover, explains Patten, “It’s our intention for the reports to be useful to citizens, neighbourhoods, people who ride the metro, people who want to know more about their city, organizations (particularly those who provide services in the indicator issue areas). We hope it will be useful to policymakers – both elected and non-elected.” The reports are purposely written in plain language and include a lot of stories and reflections so they are as accessible and user-friendly as possible.

According to Patten, one of the real differences about Vital Signs® is that it draws almost exclusively on data and research undertaken by others rather than conducting primary research. For instance, local community foundations took local data from social planning councils, universities, municipalities, etc. Then there is data from Statistics Canada, Canada Mortgage and Housing, Environment Canada, etc. “In a sense, we’re interpreting the data,” says Patten. “We play it back out to members. We’re drawing on the data and interpreting it so it can be useful and we’re doing this in plain language.”

Collaboration in action

In order to collect and interpret the data for Vital Signs®, there is a lot of collaboration. For instance, at the local level community foundations need a lot of participation from citizens and organizations. “This is an area where we need to do more work,” Patten admits. “So we’re rethinking how we can do it so we are truly tapping into the opinions and perceptions that people and organizations in our communities have. It’s challenging to get that right, to get that objectively.”

In order to create the first national report, there was a great deal of collaboration with participating community foundations agreeing to report on the same national data (to which they could add local data) and everyone agreeing on the content and committing to the day of the report release. In addition, all the participating community foundations put financial resources on the table so they could collectively purchase the data.

“There was the challenge to ensure we complemented each other, and I think we did a remarkable job of that,” reflects Patten. “We worked very hard and it took a lot of conversation. It’s hard work because we have large foundations and we have smaller foundations with fewer resources. Each of them is equally important. So supporting the diversity of capacity toward the same goal, coming to a common understanding was very important.”

To assist the collaborative efforts, CFC set up an internal web space for the participating community foundations. While it was challenging to get it going, the collaborative web space was very effective and, according to Patten, the web space was the chief way to deal with differing levels of capacity and to build a sense of everyone being in it together. Staff from different participating community foundations would post work plans, budgets, questions, requests for information, etc. In addition, every six weeks, the CFC hosted teleconference calls for all participating member foundations. Recently, staff from the participating member foundations and CFC came together for two days of meetings and the 2008 participating community foundations joined in to get a head start on next year’s Vital Signs® planning.

The extensive collaboration that led to the release of accessible and user-friendly reports is not intended to compare one community against another. Instead – and Patten is very clear about this – the intent of the Vital Signs® reports is to help people in communities across Canada to see the issues and to help nonprofit organizations support the sector.

Looking ahead…In the next installment, we look more closely at the trends identified nationally and locally, plus find out more about collaboration in action at the local level. In the third part of our series, we explore the impact of Vital Signs® in various communities across Canada and what local communities are doing with the findings.

Louise Chatterton Luchuk is a freelance writer and consultant who combines her love of writing with experience at the local, provincial and national levels of volunteer-involving organizations. For more information, visit www.luchuk.com.