DID ANYONE GET ONE of the booklets? i saw it on the news...
Small Steps Vital For Better Cities
Report points to transit, housing and poverty as key issues to tackle
Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
METRO VANCOUVER - So. What are you doing to make Metro Vancouver a better place to live?
According to a poll conducted for the Vancouver Foundation, about one in four people admit they do nothing at all to make a positive difference.
Thirty per cent of the 889 people interviewed by phone said they volunteer in the community and a handful of others admitted to recycling, walking to work or even just being polite. But it was the group that specifically said "nothing" that took foundation vice-president Barbara Grantham's breath away.
"I was very surprised that about one-quarter of the population, when given the opportunity to offer up something they are doing to make the community better, said they are doing nothing," said Grantham, project director for the foundation's Vital Signs 2007 report. "I guess I thought that even if a number of them are doing nothing, they might say that they are."
Foundation CEO Faye Wightman, a self-described Pollyanna, sees only opportunity in that seemingly bleak figure.
"I believe that the vast majority of us want to do something to make our community better, but too often they just don't know what it is or how to do it," Wightman said.
Both Grantham and Wightman point to green-movement godfather David Suzuki as the man with the right message, or at least the right way to deliver it.
"We literally need a Community Involvement for Dummies book," Wightman said. "Small steps. Otherwise the problems of our city, or our planet, can just seem overwhelming.
"Suzuki brings environmental concerns down to an individual level -- what can I as an individual do about the overwhelming problem of global warming?" she said.
What the Vancouver Foundation does is produce Vital Signs, now in its second year, as a way to really get people talking about what they can do.
The document is a glossy 33-page booklet jammed with statistics and expert and community commentary. The document acts as an annual report card for the collection of municipalities now known as Metro Vancouver with a letter grade in each of 12 categories. Another 200 pages of supporting "deep data" is available online at
www.vancouverfoundation.bc.ca.
"We've done things a little differently this year, providing a little story in each section about what we've done to improve things," Wightman said. "And I hope that people will see in it a way that they can do something as an individual too."
"Of course we want this report to generate dialogue, but we want it to generate action, too."
So Vital Signs tells you how to give your financial support, your time, where you can make a difference," Grantham added.
Citizen input was collected in two main ways: a citizen panel of 418 selected community members and leaders who submitted letter grades and named their top priorities for change; and a telephone survey of 889 randomly selected residents of Metro Vancouver.
Vital Signs is chock full of factoids and fascinating bits of behavioural dissonance of the kind that make it great tinder for discussion. The city is producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions, but more solid waste. Citizen panelists gave the region a B grade for health, but our rate of obesity is growing faster than in Canada's other major cities.
In fact, the region earned a B grade in six subjects: Health and Wellness, Arts and Culture, Belonging and Leadership, Learning, and Safety. So why no As? Aren't we the world's most livable city?
"The report is like our city's way of looking in a mirror," Grantham said. "You don't see how great you are, you see the flaws."
The grades are not based on absolute measures, they are the perceptions of a citizen grading panel, she said.
The 2007 grading panel consists of 418 people spread from Lions Bay to the Langleys. Many are community volunteers, business people, activists and others associated with the foundation's partner organizations, including the United Way and Leadership Vancouver.
About 1,200 people were invited through personal connections of all the people at the foundation, and the connections of those connections, to participate. Those who accepted received background material and submitted their opinions about the city's performance in the 12 designated subjects.
"All of our communication with the grading panel is online," Grantham explained. Pollster Ipsos Reid tabulates the results.
Transportation is a new subject in Vital Signs 2007, replacing a fuzzier concept that the 2006 report dubbed The Livable City. The switch is well-timed.
Almost half of last year's panelists named improving transit and traffic as top priorities to make the city more livable in 2006. The aforementioned Ipsos Reid poll of Metro Vancouver residents conducted for Vital Signs found that transportation is the runaway top priority, replacing the top concern of poverty and homelessness identified in last year's survey.
Nearly 80 per cent of citizen panelists listed improving transit as their top priority in the 2007 Vital Signs report.
A Statistics Canada pie graph in the report points to transportation as the second biggest household expenditure after shelter in Metro Vancouver.
Part of the reason for the shift from poverty and homelessness to transportation was a change in the survey area for the telephone poll. Last year, the poll was focused in the City of Vancouver. This year, it was on the much larger Metro Vancouver area.
That homelessness remains a top issue even though the survey area was expanded to the whole Lower Mainland indicates that people see housing affordability and poverty as an issue that extends beyond Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, Wightman said.
"People are seeing homelessness as an issue in their own backyard."
But the dominance of transportation as a priority for change mainly reflects everyone's daily frustration with getting around the city, said Wightman. "People still care about housing, poverty and homelessness; those subjects got a D and they came in second in the Ipsos survey [of Metro Vancouver residents]."
Plus, the distance that people have to travel to find housing and work is inextricably linked to affluence and affordability, Grantham added.
The Vancouver Foundation doesn't give grants for transportation infrastructure. But it can fund organizations -- such as BEST, Better Environmentally Sound Transportation -- that provide environmental education or promote alternative transportation and pressure governments to do the same.
The foundation's environment committee recently funded a study by UBC urban planning researcher Lawrence Frank about the relationship between health, exercise and urban design.
"He's one of the foremost thinkers on the continent in this area and we really helped get his message out," Wightman said. "The Sun carried it on the front page."
The other subject new to Vital Signs is Food, which produced a few eye-opening statistics, Wightman said.
Feeding a family of four on income assistance consumes 41 per cent of that family's household income. A family earning $51,000 a year would spend just 15 per cent of its income on the same groceries.
"That's an amazing difference," Wightman said. That stat alone shows just how hard it is to get along on a substandard income.
As important as the Vital Signs report has been in stimulating thought and discussion in the broader community, its impact on the Vancouver Foundation and its sister foundations across the country has been equally profound.
"We had seen what Toronto had done in 2005 and seen what a valuable tool it was for the community there to have this kind of information and to be able to use it to start discussions around these issues and plan their future," Wightman explained.
"Getting the Vital Signs report out there really deepens our network in the community."
Since the inaugural Vital Signs in 2005, the idea has caught fire. Five cities cloned the idea and executed it for themselves in 2006 with the support of the Community Foundations of Canada. This year, 11 foundations will produce a Vital Signs and Wightman said that number will grow to 18 in 2008.
"Vancouver's first Vital Signs really helped sharpen our priorities," Wightman said. "We thought there were some clear messages and a number of things that we had been doing well."
"We had been funding arts and culture and our panelists gave that a good grade, so we will continue to do that because obviously the community values it."
"But we noticed other areas where we were not as focused in our funding -- Housing and Homelessness got a D last year."
The board has spent the year since then developing ways to target funding and is on the verge of a "major announcement for an inner city project."
"Until Vital Signs, we have never been that focused on a specific need before," Wightman said.
Vital Signs 2006 also identified Belonging and Inclusion for new immigrants and aboriginals as a weakness, one that will be addressed with a targeted program in the near future. Wightman is loath to spill the details of any as-yet unannounced project.
Because of the need for consultation and partnership development with community groups and potential corporate donors, not to mention the granting process and program implementation, the lag between the first spark of an idea and a working, funded project can be years, Grantham said. "Expect the first concrete results of the 2006 report to manifest themselves next year."
Even next year, only the barest twinkle of change will be apparent. The problems the foundation is targeting are not the symptoms that show up in neat statistics, they are root causes of broader societal problems -- like poverty, housing and education -- that cross boundaries.
"Fundamental social change doesn't happen in a year," Wightman said.
As she did last year, Wightman will tour this document with speaking engagements with city councils, bureaucrats, boards of trade and community discussion forums right across the province.
Her message: It's up to all of us.
Anthropologist and writer Margaret Mead famously said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Wightman might take that one step further: It takes a whole community to effect real change, with each of us doing some small thing to improve the world around us. Vital Signs is a first step down that road.
VITAL SIGNS IN THE COMMUNITY
The Vital Signs document finds its way into thousands of hands. Local governments are receptive and Vancouver Foundation executives are often invited to present the report and lead discussions and brainstorming sessions.
The report is used extensively by urban planning and social sciences students at Simon Fraser University and the University of B.C. The non-profit sector uses Vital Signs as a bellwether to fine-tune its own activities and to pioneer new relationships with governments and the corporate sector.
"People take what we are producing and use it in a whole myriad of ways," foundation CEO Faye Wightman said. One large local non-profit organization asks prospective employees to critique Vital Signs as part of its screening and interview process, Wightman added.
But most encouragingly, thousands of high school students use Vital Signs as a starting point for their own discussions about the city and civic responsibility.
Wightman believes the next generation will erase the memory of the impenetrable group that doesn't lift a finger to make the city a better place. She warns that younger people's ideas about civic responsibility may not mirror our own.
"They want to help, but we have to let them, which means letting them get involved even if they have different ideas than us 'older folk.'"
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/n...1-836e9ab05638
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