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.