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.
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