Community Leadership through Conversations and Coordination: the Role of Local Surveys in Community Foundation Run Community Indicators Projects

Abstract

Community indicators (CI) projects rely on a variety of sources for the data that they make available to measure community well-being. While statistics collected and distributed by national and local governments are perhaps the most prevalent, some communities in both Canada and the United States have found great advantages to commissioning or administering their own surveys of local community members in order to enhance the insights that government-curated data can provide. In this paper we examine two organizations engaged with indicator projects that have opted to do so from the perspectives of their primary CI project supporters: the Vancouver Foundation in Canada and the Central New York Community Foundation in the United States. Among the advantages explored are increased capacity in key community leadership elements of: engaging residents, working across sectors, commissioning and disseminating local data and research, shaping public policy, and marshaling resources. We conclude by reflecting on the many synergies between the CI and community foundation (CF) movements, paying attention to their shared interests in community well-being through better conversations and coordination among the organizations in the communities they serve.