A few weeks ago I announced the upcoming release of the Community Foundation of Campbellford, Seymour and Northumberland’s Vital Signs Report. That event is this coming Tuesday, April 9th, at 4:00pm at the King Edward Park Community Centre. I will be speaking at the release, and what follows is a sneak peek of my talk.
What are Vital Signs?
There are a lot of different ways to set goals and track our progress towards them, but just getting the data is the first part. Every five years or so the federal government undertakes a census, and that’s where most of the data in the Vital Signs report comes from. If filling out a census form ever seems like a drag to you, please know how valuable it is; the census is, without a doubt, the best source of data for determining how effectively we are creating a better society! That said, we are also aware that the last census was from 2021, and that a LOT has changed since then. So wherever possible, the Community Foundation has used data that is more up to date.
But the Vital Signs report isn’t just a bunch of statistics; they’ve brought the data together in a way that is accessible, and that shows how interrelated these issues are. To do that, they’ve mapped this local data to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Even at first glance, it’s fairly easy to see that we can’t achieve some of these goals without at least making progress in others, and that success in some will greatly support success in others. For example, we know that we currently produce more than enough food to feed everyone on earth, so if we achieve Goal 1, No Poverty, we will almost certainly also achieve Goal 2, Zero Hunger. And if we do that, eliminating malnutrition will go a long way toward solving Goal 3, Good Health and Well-Being. And we know that it’s difficult to learn on an empty stomach or with illness, so Goal 4, Quality Education, should come much more easily after that. And education is one of the earliest and largest areas where gender inequality gaps widen, so getting quality education will greatly improve Goal 5, Gender Equality. And so on.
Of course, these goals are not sequential; every nation on earth needs to be working on all of them at the same time, and that can feel overwhelmingly large. It feels like it’s out of our hands. I’ve seen municipal councils in Northumberland say as much, saying that things like climate change are global problems that are too big for a municipal council to address. But that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the way that these problems get solved. They need to be addressed on every level, and not just every level of government. Your efforts are needed too.
The Three-Lane Highway
The problem with saying “we’re too small to make a difference” is that scale doesn’t work that way. “Big” is not a category that excludes “small”, big is the accumulation of a whole lot of smalls. Very few things can happen at a large scale if they don’t first happen at a small scale, and that’s very true of climate change and all of the other SDGs: they can’t happen at all at the federal or international level without every little community doing their part. And when I say “every little community” I don’t mean “every little municipal corporation”; community includes much more than just government.
Folks in the Community Development field sometimes talk about a “three-lane highway” to describe the way that institutions, associations, and community efforts all contribute to society.
Imagine an ideal city in the distance, and we’re all trying to get there on a three-lane highway. “Getting there” might mean building things, enacting policies, creating programs, making cultural change, or forging community bonds. The three levels or lanes each have different specialties and amounts of traffic: the left lane might be the institutional lane, full of heavy truck traffic that moves huge volumes but maybe does it too slowly. That prompts some folks to cut into the associational lane, organizing nonprofits to address specific issues more quickly and nimbly than a government institution typically can. And in the right lane is the community groups, reciprocal neighbourliness, and individual actions that might even be better described as a bike lane: it takes a lot of effort and it moves slowly, but the journey is as important as the destination.
Each of these three lanes has its advantages, and quite different ways of doing things; while each lane might be able to get us all there eventually, we need all three lanes working together to truly succeed.
What Does This Mean for Us?
At the event I’ll look at a few ways that our local data in Brighton identifies some priorities we might choose to focus our efforts on (I don’t want to give away the whole talk here!), and over the next few weeks I’ll dig into different sections of the report to shine a local spotlight on those issues. But the most important thing I want to stress here is that each of us, in our respective lanes, is doing the little work that brings us closer to the big goals. There is nothing in that SDG list that isn’t somehow applicable to the Municipality of Brighton, or the Rotary Club of Brighton, or the individual actions of someone living on Elizabeth Street in Brighton.
We are not responsible for solving global problems, as if it were all on our own. But we are responsible for our own actions, and for the kind of society that we inhabit right here in our little town. What we do matters; what YOU do matters. You might not be able to solve SDG 2, Zero Hunger, but you can support the food bank. The municipality can’t solve SDG 5, Gender Equality, but we can ensure that we address the gender wage gap in the way that we pay our employees. The municipality and individuals might not be able to solve SDG 1, No Poverty, but we can support associations like the Community Foundation and the United Way, who give grants to all sorts of initiatives from associations and community groups to address poverty. And while our local efforts won’t solve these problems globally, and might not even be able to completely solve them locally, we can move the needle on them, getting us closer to the better world we can see not too far in the distance. And those improvements can then be noted in the next census, and the next Vital Signs report, showing us our progress as we move along that three-lane highway.
So please, if you’re available on Tuesday at 4pm, join us for the Brighton launch of the Vital Signs report to see why you matter to your community, and to the world.