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Community Indicators

Community indicators are sources of quantifiable information about the state of a community. The communities in question are typically towns, cities, or regions, but sometimes they are entities as large as an entire state or province. The movement to use community indicators to evaluate communities became popular in the United States in the mid-1980s; since then, more than 200 communities have completed community indicator projects. The community indicator reports from many of these communities are posted on Web sites and are open to public review and comment. For these projects to be successful, all sectors of the community must be involved in developing and sharing a common vision of community life. Within the community, a community indicators project may be initiated by businesses, concerned citizens, the government, or action groups such as environmental groups.

Goals and Approaches

There are four different approaches to community indicators, but all share a basic set of common goals. They seek to collect quantifiable information, to make comparisons over time and across communities, to establish community plans, to use the process to build or strengthen a shared vision of community life, and to assess progress. The four major approaches to community indicators are the quality-of-life approach, the sustainability approach, the health indicators approach, and the benchmark approach.

The quality-of-life approach began with the Jacksonville, Florida, Community Council, in 1985. It focuses most heavily on indicators of economic wellbeing, although it has expanded over the years to incorporate other indicators as well. The sustainability approach is tied to the environmental movement and began with the Sustainable Seattle initiative in 1993. More so than other approaches, the sustainability approach focuses on environmental quality and takes an ecological perspective, with the local community seen as an organic entity that interacts with the global system. It has been influential internationally and played a role at the 1992 Earth Summit. The health indicators movement measures community well-being by examining community public health. The Association for Community Health Improvement (formerly the Coalition for Healthier Cities and Communities), a U.S. national organization, is an active supporter of the healthycommunity model. The benchmark approach began in Oregon in 1991 and seeks to apply local measures of community well-being at the state level

Choosing Indicators

Regardless of approach, all community indicators projects measure community life in several domains. The most common ones are the economy, environment, government and civic life, social life, culture and recreation, health, education, mobility and transportation, and public safety. For each of these domains, information is gathered for several indicators. The information is always presented in quantitative form, most commonly as a rate or percentage (for example, population growth rate or percentage of high school graduates). The use of quantitative data allows for comparisons from year to year and with other communities. However, because the indicators used reflect local beliefs about and goals regarding quality of life, health, or sustainability, different communities use different sets of indicators. For example, a community that uses the quality-of-life approach is likely to rely heavily on economic indicators, while a community following the sustainability model will use more environmental indicators. The data come from a variety of sources, including local and regional governments and their agencies, nonprofit organizations such as chambers of commerce or branches of the League of Women Voters, interest groups, commissioned surveys, and the state and national governments.

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