How do you measure the health of a community? What kinds of data do we collect and use, and why?
Where Your Treasure Is, There Your Heart Will Be
The things that we count are the things that we think about, and the things that we think about are the things that we value when we make decisions. That’s why it’s so important that we take the time to measure the things that we value most: it reminds us of our priorities when we have to determine how to spend our resources.
It’s common in the business world to have Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that focus on what have become standard measures of business health. Most of those measures are numerical and financial: numbers of sales, percentage of profit, efficiency of production, and of course, shareholder returns. But businesses that prioritize these metrics are also often criticized for putting too much priority on profits over matters of ethics and responsibility, and there’s a rising movement to evaluate businesses on matters of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) matters. Organizations such as B Corp offer certification to businesses that embed ethical considerations into their business model, and getting that certification requires that those businesses monitor and collect data on how they do business in order to meet the B Corp standards. The goal is to get businesses paying attention to their social and environmental impact on the world, so that businesses can improve not just their bottom line, but their “triple bottom line” – positive social and environmental impacts as well as more profits.
Gross Domestic Product
While businesses are often too focused on the bottom line as a singular metric of success, governments have an even worse measurement for success: Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. It’s a number that’s derived by adding up all of the money that changed hands in the country in a year to see how much economic activity there has been. When we talk about “growing the economy”, we’re actually talking about this number.
The problem with GDP as the main measurement of the success of a government is that it doesn’t necessarily tell us much at all about what we actually value. In general, more economic activity means more people getting paid, which can be associated with more income and less poverty, which can be associated with better health and education and all sorts of other things that we actually do value. The trouble is, more money changing hands doesn’t necessarily mean any of those things.
For an example from our little-known history that I just learned, imagine that a large corporation spent a lot of money paying employees to produce something harmful–say, Agent Orange and napalm, as Canadian companies did during the war in Vietnam. The production of those weapons resulted in thousands of people getting paid their wages, millions of dollars each year; and of course, the company was then able to sell those weapons to the US for billions of dollars each year (adjusted for inflation). Then Americans used those weapons in Vietnam, a brutal and bloody war; meanwhile, Canada had set up and staffed hospitals in Vietnam, where Canadians were getting paid to attempt to heal people who were wounded by those same Canadian-made weapons. All of that gets counted in the figures to determine the GDP, so the war in Vietnam was great for the Canadian economy. But did we produce anything truly valuable? We paid some people to make a terrible mess, and then paid other people to attempt to clean it up. By any standard other than economic, it was a complete atrocity; but by GDP standards, it was a great success.
Alternatives to GDP
The weakness of GDP as a measurement of the success of a society has been well-known for a very long time, and alternatives exist. Here are a few of my favourites:
- The Genuine Progress Indicator, which seeks to calculate not just the value of economic activity but also the costs of social services and environmental degradation. In this kind of model, the cost of running hospitals in Vietnam would be subtracted from the economic gains of selling weapons.
- Doughnut Economics, which quantifies and counts the needs of a healthy society as well as the limits of our planet, aiming for a balance between the two that provides enough for humans to thrive sustainably without destroying the ecosystems we depend on.
- The World Happiness Report, which measures and ranks nations on the happiness of their citizens. If money can’t buy happiness, then surely happiness is a better metric of success than how much money we spend.
- The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which measure 17 specific metrics of a healthy society. These include economic growth, but the first goal is No Poverty, an important distinction; and there are human and environmental health and equity goals throughout. The SDGs are not designed to replace GDP as an economic measurement, so much as to give nations specific goals to strive for in order to create healthier, more sustainable societies.
Bringing it Local
The measurements we’ve looked at so far are at the level of national governments. What metrics and data do we use locally?
The province of Ontario requires that municipalities have Asset Management Plans which maintain databases detailing the condition and lifespan of all municipal assets to determine when they will need to be replaced and how much they will cost. You can see Brighton’s AMP here. If ever you’ve wondered when your road or street will be repaved, that’s how you can find out! This is how we keep track of what we own, and make sure we’re able to take care of it.
Municipalities are also required to make our budget documents publicly available every year. You can see past budgets here, and our staff try very hard in these documents to contextualize numbers that can otherwise feel very abstract.
When we contextualize data in budgets and other measuring documents, we tend to contextualize them to the Strategic Plan, and various Master Plan documents, that set out our priorities. The success of our municipality is ultimately measured against how much of these plans we’re able to implement. This is where our real priorities make an appearance: if we want to use happiness or sustainability as the true measures of success in Brighton, we need to embed those metrics in our Strategic Plan, and then budget accordingly to implement it.
Increasingly, municipalities are getting more intentional about communicating data to residents. Northumberland County just unveiled a data tracking tool called the Performance Dashboard, which gives residents an at-a-glance accounting of several Key Performance Indicators in categories such as Service Excellence, Economic Opportunity, Thriving Community, Sustainable Growth, and Vibrant Future, all drawn from the County’s Strategic Plan. You can hear the CAO and project lead talk about it here.
Nonprofits with Data
Governments aren’t the only ones looking into these metrics. The Community Foundation is a nonprofit group that has local chapters throughout Canada, including one here in Northumberland. They identify strategic investments in community programs and assets, which is to say that they give money where it will help the most. They’re currently promoting a Vital Signs Report that identifies metrics for things like community engagement, sense of belonging, and well-being, all things that contribute to a healthy life and a healthy community. They’ll be presenting a Northumberland-specific report in Brighton on April 9th, 4:00-5:30 at the Community Centre. Please join us to see how Northumberland fares in these metrics of well-being! I will be giving a short address on how the many issues represented in the report impact one another, and how we can each play a part in addressing them to make our community stronger.