Community Well-being Report
In the Fall, we invited people living and/or working in the Headwaters Region to take part in HCIA's first-ever survey and more than 400 of you did! Then, we took the themes from the survey and asked citizens to deepen our understanding of them in focus group conversations.
Your answers are helping us better understand what folks see as contributing to -- and challenging -- the well-being of our community. Read the summary of citizen opinions to learn what is shaping the content of our Community Well-being Reports.
What will be included in the Community Well-being Reports?
We used the survey and focus group input to outline a series of 3 proposed Community Well-Being Reports. Each Report highlights and measures a different theme about community well-being. Together the 3 reports will provide a comprehensive profile of community well-being in the Headwaters area.
Report 1: Preserving & Strengthening Our Strong Sense
of Community & Rural Beauty
In the spring of 2009, we will publish a report that will highlight measures related to factors that impact our ties to our community. This includes how we design our communities, what we do to ensure that all citizens including our most vulnerable populations have the means by which to participate in community life, and opportunities for social gathering such as community associations, arts, culture, and recreation. Rural beauty will be discussed with respect to our commitment as a community to preserve it.
Report 2: Community Economic Sustainability
This report responds to citizen concern regarding adequate jobs, keeping young people in the community, supporting small businesses and family farms, improving amenities and services, and dealing with the issue of commuting. We will begin work on this report by holding conversations with citizens to better understand what is needed for our community to be more economically competitive. We will determine community commitment to shared action, and then decide what needs to be monitored over time to signal our progress.
Report 3: Strengthening Citizen Leadership
Citizens told us that they wanted to see further citizen involvement and ownership for the well-being of the community. They pointed to improving mechanisms for community members to engage in regular community-wide dialogue and decision making, and attending to the declining volunteerism. Their ideas acknowledge that a vibrant community is built by a shared sense of possibility of which everyone is a part and to which everyone must contribute.
Together, the reports encompass all the measures identified in our Working Group's earlier Indicator Framework.
Ultimately, HCIA's aim is to track -- and report on -- changes in these measures over time so that we can all monitor the progress of our collective efforts to positively impact the well-being of our community.
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