Winkler Community Foundation (WCF) invited community leaders to the launch of its 2024 Vital Signs initiative last week.
The Vital Signs project is a kind of community check-up that measures quality of life in a variety of areas and allows residents to weigh-in on local priorities, challenges, and needs. WCF first gathered data for Vital Signs reports in 2012 and again in 2018.
“Our community has undergone some significant shifts and changes in the last number of years, and if we don’t continue to measure all those areas, those domains of wellbeing, then we’re not going to have an accurate measurement for how to move forward,” said WCF board chair Corey Hildebrand. “The way that we measure the standard of living and of wellness in our community is by taking this snapshot, and then we can measure it back compared to the last two reports and see where we celebrate, where we’ve met the mark, and where the challenges are.”
Vital Signs breaks community wellbeing into several areas: culture and belonging, community resilience, standard of living, health and wellness, environment, education and learning, civic and democratic engagement, and arts and recreation.
“It’s a framework so that you make sure that you look at factors in different areas of the community so there’s no real blind spots,” explained project lead Kara Gray from Great Matter Insights, the firm tasked with heading up the research for Vital Signs 2024.
Feedback on all these areas will be gleaned in a number of ways, starting with last week’s session that invited participants to share their thoughts.
“We wanted to get community leaders engaged and talking about [wellbeing],” Gray said. “And also hearing from them which areas they’d prefer to focus on.”
A series of roundtable discussions will be held in the weeks ahead designed to engage multiple segments of the community.
“We want the whole community to be able to talk about it,” Gray said. “This spring there’s going to be a community-wide survey.”
Hildebrand noted the information in past Vital Signs reports has been invaluable.
“We redid our granting policies and our metrics and measurements for granting because of what we saw in Vital Signs,” he said. “And it’s also allowed us to be catalysts for lots of community conversations.
Backed with hard data from Vital Signs, those conversations have helped community groups and stakeholders connect with each other about needed programs and services.
But the project is only as good as the responses it receives from the community, Hildebrand said, urging people to participate when asked.
“We’re measuring what matters. We’re measuring the heartbeat of the community,” he said. “So if we don’t have people’s buy-in and the actual information, we’re not going to be able to make the changes that they want to see in this community.”
More details about the public surveys will be available in the coming weeks.
