KEYS Region Indicators & beyond
How do we measure our well-being? Money? Peace of mind? Relationships? Fairness? Health?
The indicators used on these pages offer a starting place for conversations about what we want to measure. Please look at the indicator sections on each of the pages under "Topics" in the top menu to see what each work group selected and collected during the 2004-2006 process.
You can learn more about community indicators in general at the Community Indicators Consortium (CIC) website: http://www.communityindicators.net/
At that website, or right here, you can download "Informing Our Nation: Improving How to Understand and Assess the USA's Position and Progress" (A report from the US Government Accountability Office)
From the Introduction of that report:
"Difficult decisions related to societal aims, such as improving health care, enhancing security, or sustaining the environment require reliable, unbiased, and useful indicators that are readily accessible to citizens, the media, advocates, businesses, policymakers, nonprofit leaders, researchers, and other audiences. While in many ways such information about the world is more available today than ever before, too often it is in diverse formats and locations that may make it difficult to locate and use effectively and to provide a general picture of a jurisdiction’s position and progress. In addition, it is not easy to ensure that the most relevant and important information is accessible, recognized, and used by a wide variety of people and institutions. As a result, public and private decision making about issues and solutions may be based on information that is limited, fragmented, and incomplete."
If you'd like to learn about community indicator reports that are more developed than ours in the KEYS region, see Appendix 3 of the report mentioned above, and/or take a look at these websites:
Boston, Massachusetts http://www.tbf.org/indicatorsProject/
Burlington, Vermont http://www.unitedwaycc.org/ccountsdata.htm
Jacksonville, Florida http://www.jcci.org/statistics/statistics.aspx
Larimer County, Colorado http://www.larimer.org/compass/
Nothern New England Indicators: http://nneindicators.unh.edu/
Oregon Benchmarks http://egov.oregon.gov/DAS/OPB/obm.shtml
Sustainable Pittsburgh http://www.sustainablepittsburgh.org/
Sustainable Seattle http://www.sustainableseattle.org/
Vermont Outcomes and Indicators http://www.ahs.state.vt.us/publs/docs/05swb/05swbinfo.cfm
www.proveandimprove.org/new/documents/vermont_outcomes.pdf
Redefining Progress: http://redefiningprogress.org/projects/indicators/
If you would like to learn more about indicators at a Maine-based state website, go to www.CommunityData.Info where you can link to many sites with data resources, and to a site that makes GIS (Geographic Information Systems) maps "on the fly" (do it yourself in minutes, on the web, no software to download). You can make maps of census and REIS data for any of the 50 states, and maps of Maine data from the Department of Education and DHHS. (The maps on our Economy topic page were made at this website.)
For an extensive list of data sources, see:
http://www.firstgov.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/Data.shtml
For another proposed set of 12 quality of life indicators, see:
http://www.calvert-henderson.com/
If you are interested in getting involved with our indicators work, please email us at info@keysregion.org
