Vital Signs: A Springboard for Action

The final part in a three-part series written by Community Foundations of Canada President and CEO Monica Patten and Vital Signs Program Director Sara Lyons. This article can be downloaded (PDF) in its entirety in the current issue of The Philanthropist, (Vol. 22. No. 1, 2009) a quarterly journal published in Canada.


As Vital Signs evolves, participating community foundations are treating the publication of their reports as the beginning of a cycle, not the end. An enormous amount of work goes into gathering input and data and publishing high-quality reports. Typically, staff and volunteers spend hundreds of hours combing through data, making content clear and reader-friendly, selecting photos and community stories etc. The next step is to share what has been learned with the community and engage them in a discussion about their community’s quality of life.


The Toronto Community Foundation, which is where the Vital Signs model originated, has a rich approach to linking its report findings to action. The foundation hosts Toronto Dialogues, a “transformative dialogue” informed by Toronto’s Vital Signs, in which the foundation convenes people who share a concern for a particular problem such as housing, public space or youth safety to explore the issue with an eye to generating tangible actions. Participants have often never worked together before.

Catalyzing Rich Conversations
Realizing the full value of Vital Signs requires a commitment to using it as a catalyst to engage the public and media in the emergent narrative about the state of our communities.

Sometimes this is done directly. Through a sponsorship, 25,000 copies of a four-page summary of Vancouver Vital Signs were distributed to health centres, libraries, community centres, and schools across Vancouver. More often it is done through the media. Vital Signs has been met with tremendous interest on the part of local and national media. All participating foundations publish their reports on the same day, which builds profile and interest. Vital Signs is the top story of the day in all of the publishing communities. In most cases, reporters and editorial boards write companion articles and in a few cases Executive Directors of foundations publish monthly newspaper columns discussing Vital Signs findings and community responses.

In 2007, Community Foundations of Canada began publishing Canada’s Vital Signs, a report focused on national data . In 2008, CFC went one step further and published the report as an insert PDF) in The Globe and Mail. In doing so our goals were to come into Canadians’ homes with data about issues that need our immediate attention, such as poverty rates and the economic integration of immigrants, right into Canadians’ homes. The insert was designed to catalyze public discussion on these and other issues, to provide stories that could inspire ideas and action.

Challenges
Practically speaking, one of the challenges facing the Vital Signs program is obtaining sufficient and up to date data. The Census is done every five years and apart from that, information gathering about the population tends to be done through surveys. This means that for smaller communities there is frequently an insufficient sample to produce reliable results. Local sources such as school boards, transportation and health authorities and municipal governments tend to be helpful in providing data and some foundations commission local polling to add details about local perceptions or concerns. Whereas foundations always start their Vital Signs process with the question “what do we want know?”, ultimately the content of the reports is circumscribed by what data is available.

Since the Vital Signs program relies heavily on the media to carry our message, there is an inherent lack of control over what will ultimately be communicated to the general public. The most compelling data in Vital Signs tends to leap into the headlines and create a need to be vigilant about asserting a connection to philanthropy. Stories about how communities are responding to that data tend to be a secondary story for the media and community foundations need to work very hard to maintain the connection to action.

Media clippings related to Vital Signs number in the hundreds each year, putting the top data stories firmly into the community spotlight. But it is harder to measure a consequent rise in community philanthropy and related strategic grant making. The Victoria Foundation has received two $1 million gifts as a direct result of their publishing Victoria’s Vital Signs, with donors contacting the foundation for the first time after seeing their report. But examples like this are not frequent and the work of building community philanthropy through Vital Signs must be seen as a long-term process. When existing donors are considering their own granting choices, we see Vital Signs having an impact. Ultimately though, Vital Signs is just one of many tools that community philanthropists use to make decisions, alongside charitable marketing campaigns, historical and personal connections to certain causes, etc.

Broadly speaking, Vital Signs is not intended to package up community philanthropy and high-impact granting into a tidy box and, even for foundation’s own discretionary granting, it is one tool among many. Further, Vital Signs can create a challenge by raising expectations that community foundations will take responsibility for solving all the problems that are discussed through the reports. Balancing the task of publishing the reports on an annual basis with the equally important need to respond to the issues raised by the report, is also an ongoing challenge.


Conclusion
Vital Signs is a relatively new approach for Canada’s community foundations. It was born in Toronto in the mid-90s when the city was looking at the amalgamation of the city with several neighbouring boroughs – a group of community leaders came together because they wanted to be able to measure how the new expanded city was doing. In 2001, Vital Signs became a Toronto Community Foundation initiative.


As Toronto’s Vital Signs grew in popularity and profile, community foundations across Canada began to take notice. In 2006, CFC began coordinating the program on a national level and participation in Vital Signs has grown steadily since then, from an initial pilot with 6 community foundations, to 18 foundations in 2009.


The fit with community foundation’s role is so strong that Vital Signs is attracting attention outside of Canada as well. Community foundations from Europe, the U.S., South Africa, and Australia have been exploring Vital Signs as a way to monitor local quality of life and the first non-Canadian version, Sinais Vitais was launched by the Instituto Comunitário Grande Florianópolis in Brazil in 2008.

Vital Signs has been very successful for community foundations in allowing us to initiate and fuel important conversations about quality of life and inequalities. Vital Signs encourages us, and others, to take a transformational approach.

Vital Signs: Framing Community Realities and Needs

The second in a three-part series written by Community Foundations of Canada President and CEO Monica Patten and Vital Signs Program Director Sara Lyons. This article can be downloaded (PDF) in its entirety in the current issue of The Philanthropist, (Vol. 22. No. 1, 2009) a quarterly journal published in Canada.

For community foundation donors who are eager to target their grant making to address the highest needs, Vital Signs is a valuable resource. Typically, copies of the report are widely available through inserts in daily newspapers and direct mail outs to the community foundation’s own donors and other partners. At least one foundation, the Toronto Community Foundation, has gone the next step and developed a companion publication, Vital Ideas, which catalogues high impact and closely-vetted grant opportunities in the same issues areas (Learning, Health, etc.) that are covered in Toronto’s Vital Signs. By directly linking research about the community with real grant opportunities, the foundation provides donors with the complete knowledge needed to engage in strategic community philanthropy.


The Red Deer & District Community Foundation found that the biggest impact of Vital Signs came from the way it engaged the community, and consequently the foundation’s Board, in a process of priority setting. Through Vital Signs homelessness and the environment were identified as key priorities. In response, the foundation created new funds dedicated to supporting those areas and has hosted fundraisers attracting both existing and new donors.


While Vital Signs is not designed to involve original research, sometimes the act of compiling data and putting it into the public realm allows community foundations to uncover and highlight areas in need of attention. In the Canadian context there are many ways that data about quality of life in our communities is shared: think-tanks, governments, media, etc. Vital Signs is an opportunity for discovery because it gathers data across the established issue areas, whether or not those are the usual domains of discussion in a particular community, and whether or not that data has previously had public attention. As a consequence, from time to time Vital Signs reports shine the light on urgent matters that have received insufficient attention.


For example, Calgary’s Vital Signs 2008 brought public attention to a number of disturbing statistics about how immigrants were settling in Calgary. Due to the local economic boom, Calgary has become a magnet for migrants from other regions of Canada, including many newcomers. Calgary’s Vital Signs revealed that while 50% of employed immigrants who come to the region have post secondary educational credentials, their average income is 63% lower than non-immigrants. By raising awareness, the report gave confidence to the city’s diverse community to work together to combat marginalization. The Ethno-Cultural Council of Calgary’s 1,000 Voices initiative is bringing together cultural community leaders and policy makers to address issues including racial profiling, access to health care, accreditation of foreign credentials and hate crime.


When the Community Foundation of Ottawa sought to highlight domestic violence statistics in its 2008 report, they made a significant discovery. No statistics about shelter use were being kept across the city’s shelters. The shelters all kept data and offered to work together to create a city-wide tally. In talking to shelter staff the foundation learned also that a stunning total of 5,150 women had to be turned away due to full capacity at these shelters. This information was the lead story in the city’s largest daily newspaper on the day Ottawa’s Vital Signs launched, raising awareness of the statistic and domestic violence more broadly.


The Sudbury Community Foundation has given its report a Northern Ontario flavour, publishing data about a number of communities in the region facing similar challenges and opportunities. As well, to reflect its significant Aboriginal population, Sudbury’s Vital Signs contains a section titled Aboriginal Community Life which contains stats about population growth, education attainment, income levels, etc. In these ways, the Sudbury Community Foundation uses Vital Signs to demonstrate its connection to, and build awareness of, regional and Aboriginal concerns.

Tomorrow's blog: Part 3 - Vital Signs: A Springboard for Action

Vital Signs: Connecting Community Needs to Community Philanthropy in Canada

The first in a three-part series written by Community Foundations of Canada President and CEO Monica Patten and Vital Signs Program Director Sara Lyons. This article can be downloaded (PDF) in its entirety in the current issue of The Philanthropist, (Vol. 22. No. 1, 2009) a quarterly journal published in Canada.

Canadian community foundations are a key supporter of the charitable sector across the country, which is one of the largest in the world. A key challenge for philanthropy in this vibrant environment is how to sort through competing priorities, identify highly strategic opportunities for support and clear some space for deeper conversations and solutions. Through its Vital Signs program, a growing number of community foundations are trying to do just that.

As community philanthropists, community foundations take a very broad approach to community vitality. They support the full scope of the charitable sector, responding to and highlighting emergent needs, helping shape public policy discussions, and supporting social innovation. This article will take a detailed look at Vital Signs, a national program developed by Canada’s community foundations to bolster this perspective on community philanthropy.


Community Foundations and Vital Signs


For many years, Canadian community foundations have been working to deepen their involvement in building more vital communities: seeking to bring people together from all parts of the community to stimulate new ideas and build participation. The growing emphasis on community leadership is the result of two key realities. First, our broad networks give us a natural opportunity to engage community members with high levels of social capital. Secondly, our ongoing work as asset-builders and grant makers gives us a strategic perch from which to see trends, challenges and connections in our communities.


For the past three years, a program called Vital Signs, which is lead at the national level by Community Foundations of Canada, has provided a new level of precision and drive to our community philanthropy. Vital Signs is an annual community check-up conducted by local community foundations to measure the vitality of our communities, identify significant trends, and assign grades in at least ten areas critical to quality of life. Each community's report card data is a compilation of numerous research sources that help communities make connections between issues and trends in different areas. The creation of the report involves a community engagement process to determine key research questions, identify research sources and, at the end of the process, elicit the community’s response to the compiled data. The findings are presented in a reader-friendly format to make them as accessible as possible.

As a tool, the Vital Signs program, which will include 18 Canadian community foundations in 2009, has had a positive impact on our community philanthropy in four key ways:


• With recent and trend data, community foundations have important information with which to target their grant making to address urgent and sometimes hidden needs;
• Using the Vital Signs publication, community foundations are able to reach out to prospective donors and provide valuable strategic information to existing donors;
• Through the community engagement aspect of Vital Signs, community foundations build new relationships, reach new groups and create forums for networking and collective action;
• By publishing critical information in a format designed for the public, and by doing so simultaneously across the country, community foundations contributes to important public policy debates in Canada.

Community Knowledge


Community knowledge is at the heart of community foundations’ capacity to work with donors to affect philanthropic impact. Community foundations already gather plenty of information about trends, assets and needs in their communities, through their broad network of community relationships, the community leaders who volunteer on their Boards of Directors and committees and through their wide-ranging and open grant proposal processes.

Vital Signs takes this web of information gathering one step further by injecting hard data in areas that correspond to the foundation’s grant making fields of interest. Importantly, Vital Signs is not about conducting new research, it’s about gathering existing research from a variety of sources (national, regional, local, government, non-government) that pertain to the geographic area that the foundation is mandated to serve. This ranges from the Census, to annual stats from school boards, hospitals and women’s shelters. The program requires that data is sought within the following ten issue areas: The Gap Between Rich and Poor, Safety, Health, Learning, Housing, Getting Started, Arts and Culture, Environment, Work, Belonging and Leadership. As is relevant locally, community foundations may add issues areas; for example, many choose to highlight transportation issues.

Typically, a Vital Signs report contains four to ten statistical indicators in each of 10 to 12 issue areas. Examples of indicators would be: youth unemployment rates, average waiting times for subsidized housing, and the percentage of elected official coming from visible minorities. The selection of which indicators “tell the story” is at the discretion of the community foundation but over the years this evolves as new perspectives and data emerge.

Collected data becomes one of several inputs that guide the establishment of granting priorities. For instance, when its Vital Signs report indicated a local rate of obesity higher than the national average, the Greater Saint John Community Foundation supported the local track association and helped to build a new running track for residents.

Low literacy and learning findings in Waterloo Region’s Vital Signs were behind The Kitchener and Waterloo Community Foundation’s decision to make a $100, 000 four-year commitment to a new education-support program. Pathways to Education had drastically reduced drop out rates in Toronto and encouraged students to pursue post-secondary education. By sharing the story of this unique program with donors in the Waterloo Region, and connecting it to the data findings in Vital Signs, the foundation leveraged a nearly matching amount of support for the Pathways program.

Tomorrow's blog: Part 2 - Vital Signs: Framing Community Realities and Needs.

Media advisory: 8 days until Vital Signs 2009

OTTAWA (Sept. 28, 2009) – Community foundations in 16 Canadian communities are releasing their annual Vital Signs report cards, aimed at measuring the vitality of their communities, on Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2009. The reports will be posted at http://www.vitalsignscanada.ca/.

Vital Signs gives each community foundation, its donors, and the community-at-large valuable insight into the area’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges. The reader-friendly report cards track quality of life in key areas such as learning, health, housing, and the environment.

“We know leaders, citizens and organizations across the country are looking for ways to have an impact on the challenges facing our communities. Vital Signs provides a blueprint for reflection, discussion and action,” says Monica Patten, President and CEO of Community Foundations of Canada.

This year’s participants are:

• Victoria, BC
• Central Okanagan, BC*
(includes Kelowna and area)
• Sunshine Coast, BC*
• Boundary Communities, BC*
(includes Christina Lake, Grand Forks, Greenwood, Midway, Rock Creek., Bridesville, Beaverdell )
• Calgary, AB
• Medicine Hat, AB
• Red Deer, AB
• Kingston & Area, ON*
• Ottawa, ON
• Toronto, ON
• Oakville, ON
• Guelph & Wellington, ON
• Waterloo Region, ON
(includes Kitchener-Waterloo and Cambridge)
• Greater Sudbury, ON
• Greater Saint John, NB
• Wolfville, NS*
*denotes a community releasing its first Vital Signs report


Community Foundations of Canada, the national membership association for the country’s 165 community foundations, will also be releasing Canada’s Vital Signs 2009, a national report that tracks trends, shares success stories, and encourages deeper discussion and debate. The report will be published online on Oct. 6 at www.vitalsignscanada.ca.


Polling released on Oct. 14
In addition to the publication of Canada’s Vital Signs, Community Foundations of Canada has conducted national polling about the quality of life in our communities. The polling, conducted by Environics Research Group, will be released on Wednesday, Oct. 14 and featured in an insert in The Globe and Mail.


For ongoing updates, follow Canada’s Vital Signs on Twitter.


About Vital Signs & Community Foundations
Canada’s 165 community foundations are local charitable foundations that help Canadians invest in building strong and resilient places to live, work, and play. Together we are one of the largest supporters of Canadian communities, providing $169 million in support of local priorities and organizations in 2008. To find out more visit http://www.cfc-fcc.ca/.


The national Vital Signs project is based on Toronto’s Vital Signs,® an extremely successful indicator report developed by Toronto Community Foundation, which was first published in 2001. Since expanding to the national scene in 2006, Vital Signs has become the platform for local action among a wide range of community leaders, including governments, not-for-profits, philanthropists, the private sector, and individual citizens.


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Media contacts
Anne-Marie McElrone
Director of Communications and Marketing
902.461.8284 (w)
902.223.0674 (c)
amcelrone@cfc-fcc.ca


Skana Gee
Vital Signs Communications Coordinator
902.466.7191 (w)
902.223.5234 (c)
gee.skana@gmail.com


*Communiqué disponible en français

Taking our communities’ Vital Signs

With just one week to go until the launch of Vital Signs 2009, community foundations across Canada are getting ready to present research findings to their communities.

The launch of 16 local reports and our national Canada’s Vital Signs report on October 6 marks the fourth year of the national Vital Signs program. And although every community puts a lot of effort into their reports, I think some of the most significant contributions that Vital Signs makes to its communities takes place long before and long after, the reports are released.  

Months in advance of gathering statistical data for their reports, community foundations meet with a wide range of organizations, often bringing them together to ask ‘What does our community want and/or need to measure?’ In some cases, they discover gaps in research or realize they can pool resources to learn more. These meetings are not the stuff of front-page news, but do they lead to change? You bet.

During community consultations last year, the Community Foundation of Ottawa made an alarming discovery. Although 1,000 women were using shelters to flee domestic abuse, no one knew how many were being turned away because the shelters were full. The research that followed found more than 5,000 women were being turned away, galvanizing the media and the community.

The community is also engaged after the research phase, when citizens are invited to rate their community’s progress. Online surveys take place months before reports are issued. Some community foundations hand out postcards at events to encourage participation; others are using Twitter and Facebook to access growing social networks. In Vancouver youth used text messaging to rate their perception of the community. The goal? Reach as many citizens as possible to build understanding of local issues and offer a concrete way to share their own views.

Launch day brings lots of local and national media attention, but Vital Signs doesn’t end after the 11 o’clock news. Rather, October 6th is meant to act as a springboard to attract Canadians’ attention and engage them in an ongoing discussion.

In the city where Vital Signs was born, the discussion has already spanned a decade – transforming the way the Toronto Community Foundation defines and responds to the strengths and challenges of Canada’s largest city. That’s because the information gathered throughout the Vital Signs process is a goldmine of community insight and understanding. It helps all the participating community foundations set granting priorities, work more effectively with donors, and act as a catalyst within their own community.

For instance, Toronto’s Vital Signs has led to the creation of Vital People, a granting program that supports valued leaders in the non-profit sector. Then there’s Vital Ideas, connecting donors to high-impact community initiatives and providing grants to community groups so they can multiply the impact of their work by sharing their learning with others. The impact stories can be found in every community across the country.

Vital Signs is only one of many important indicator initiatives in Canada, but it’s a powerful formula for building community vitality: engage the community in the gathering and disseminating of local knowledge and then put that knowledge to work via community philanthropy.

Stay tuned, we’ll have much more to share with you in the months and years ahead.We will update this blog regularly, so visit often or subscribe to our RSS feed.

(Monica Patten is the President and CEO of Community Foundations of Canada)