2016 Impact Summit

Population level improvements in well-being can be achieved through a wide array of strategies from developing housing and healthy neighborhoods, to community engagement, to the provision of services that improve access to transit and community engagement. These strategies and changes are dynamic and non-linear. Developing measures to assess resulting changes in well-being requires collaborative development of frameworks and metrics that account for a wide spectrum of activities. This panel will offer substantive discussion of three participatory approaches used to develop measures to evaluate changes in well-being at the intersection of community development and health. Each panelist will highlight their experience selecting metrics with key stakeholders, including key decisions involved in how the measures were selected and shaped. The panel will include Success Measures, The Conservation Law Foundation, and Stewards for Affordable Housing for the Future. Taken together, these indicators provide a set of metrics that offer a holistic measure of the impact of changes in place on population health and provide important insights into how we invest in and build healthy places.

1) Understanding Shelter Affordability Issues: Towards a Better Policy Framework (Smetanin) Housing affordability has become an increasing problem for a growing number of Canadian households. To identify and connect the concepts and factors that contribute to the affordability challenges of shelter, CANCEA created and will presnt a Shelter Consumption Affordability Ratio (SCAR index) that focuses upon the consumption needs of shelter.   

2) Social Equity Impact Assessment (Brenman) Social equity impact assessment is a set of tools to help determine what the logical and foreseeable consequences of a project will be on disadvantaged groups developed by the presenter after work on successful civil rights and environmental justice legal cases. It allows infrastructure developers, operators, service providers, and governments to avoid adverse impacts of their work on traditionally disadvantaged communities. 

Three independent presentations on tools for to enable tracking of wellbeing:

1) Measuring What Matters: Tracking Progress Toward Outcomes with a New Tool on Community Commons  (Riggs)  The  Community Commons team has partnered with 100 Million Healthier Lives to create a tool to measure what matters toward their goal of improving 100 million lives.  This innovative tool allows communities to articulate the work they are dong, the goals they hope to achieve, and their target populations.  The tool allows for simple tracking and display of progress over time.

2) Moving from Community Indicators to Data Consumers: Exploring the Potential of the R Platform (Ridzi)  As discussions of citizen science (i.e. crowd science, crowd-sourced science, civic science, volunteer monitoring or networked science) and the power of shared data gain legitimacy, we find an increasing trend such that countries, regions, cities and communities all over the world have set up open data web sites in the hope that concerned community members might take the opportunity to engage in "data mining" and find interesting trends that merit policy refinement. In this session we first review some of the ways in which citizen science approaches correspond with the ideals and goals of community indicator projects; explore how the open-source software (OSS) platform can serve as a bridge to link community indicators projects to citizen science; describe how combining of those data with proprietary data NS then display such data on web-based analysis tools.

3) Section 508 compliance's impact on software, web-based applications, and websites (Grinstein/Paciello/Metz/Stubblefield) This presentation will briefly discuss the legal aspects of Section 508's application which prohibits discrimination to oftware, web-based applications, and websites.  We will introduce the key technical requirements for accessibility including layout, design, navigation and feedback. Finally we will discuss the challenges of generating text alternative for non-text content such as images and visualizations and provide examples of public accessibility compliant webpages incorporating visualizations of data.

1) Measuring progress and well-being: A comparative review of indicators (Barrington-Leigh)  We provide a new database sampling well-being and progress indicators implemented since the 1970s at all geographic scales. We find that a most promising innovation is the indices whose weights are accountable to empirical data, in particular through models of subjective well-being. We conclude by amplifying others' advocacy for the appropriate separation of current well-being from environmental indicators, and for the avoidance of aggregation except where it is meaningful.

2) The State of Community Indicators: What are we measuring and what should we be measuring? (Juelfs-Swanson) By what metrics and indicators can we measure and determine if our cities are thriving? This question animates Thriving Cities’ soon-to-be released interactive web-based Indicator Explorer. The Thriving Cities’ Indicator Explorer is a unique web-based tool that highlights the various ways communities and cities are being measuring. Based on a comprehensive survey of community indicator projects that yielded over 3,000 indicators, the Indicator Explorer displays 180 of the most popular metrics used in communities across the U.S. These leading indicators are filtered by popularity and strength of social science research. This presentation will cover some of the trends in indicator selection, as gleaned from the survey, as well as the Indicator Explorer.

3) Measuring Community Indicators (Kubursi)  The presenters have developed a robust, multi-faceted computer model for use by individual government departments and agencies to estimate financial, socio-economic, and environmental quantitative impacts of projects proposals. The model highlighted in this paper belongs to a family of models developed in concert with decision-makers over a number of years. We will discuss how community indicators are relevant to decision-makers and new metrics are incorporated as improvements to indicators are made.

Many organizations collect address data all the time without ever realizing the potential for geographic insights. If you have a spreadsheet of addresses, you have geographic data. In this workshop, you will learn how easy it is to unlock insights about your community. Learn the lingo and what it means to explore spatial patterns and trends. Tools and techniques like aggregation, dot density, hot spot analysis, and spatial joins will unlock a world of insights you didn't even know you had. Take your analysis to the next level and see what's possible with a little bit of time and a lot of addresses.

For communities, understanding the economic, social, and environmental challenges and opportunities they face is a prerequisite for making investments that achieve their goals equitably. Health and quality of life—along with a host of other short- and long-term measures of well-being— are shaped by the environmental and demographic context in communities. This has engendered heightened concern in the past several years among researchers and policy-makers about the determinative effect of a person’s zip code on her life outcomes. Federal agencies have begun developing tools that can help give communities the detailed understanding necessary for achieving more equitable environmental, economic, and social outcomes, all of which play a crucial role in creating healthy, thriving neighborhoods and communities. One of these tools that is particularly useful in this regard is EPA's EJSCREEN, an environmental justice screening and mapping tool. EJSCREEN can show users where minority and low-income areas are located, the environmental issues they face, as well as a plethora of other information on community well-being.  The workshop’s speaker will show how can you use EJSCREEN to learn more about environmental justice issues in your city, town, or community. Stakeholders can find out how to use EJSCREEN to help for community outreach and awareness projects, grant applications, research, and many other uses. 

Neighborhood-scale sustainability is an essential bridge between individual action and community-wide initiative. Existing neighborhoods possess significant capacity for sustainable regeneration, and planned neighborhoods can be designed from the outset to optimize triple bottom lines. To help capture these benefits, several rating and assessment tools have emerged for practitioner and public use as neighborhood collaboration platforms, indicator frameworks, and sustainability accelerators. This session will present four major neighborhood-scale appraisal tools in the U.S., including LEED for Neighborhood Development, Enterprise Green Communities, Living Community Challenge, and EcoDistricts Protocol. Each tool will be explored by scope, typical applications, user skills, costs, and appraisal output. The session will give participants an understanding of neighborhood sustainability appraisal techniques, a recognition of appraisal tool choices and capabilities, and the knowledge to select best-¬fit tools for their neighborhoods. 

Do you measure performance? What about community or population impact? Have you aligned them yet? Wherever you are with data today, Clear Impact would like to show you some tools that are available for tracking the performance of your programs, measuring the impact of your funding, and reporting on the progress of your missions and partners to improve the quality of life in the your community. As a participant, you will learn about a process for connecting your day-to-day work to the outcomes you want to achieve in the community you serve, how to consistently use your data to get from talk to beneficial action swiftly, and how to add accountability and transparency in your organization and in your network of partners.

This presentation will focus on Results-Based Accountability (RBA), a disciplined way of thinking about your work to improve your programs to improve the population you serve. Developed by Mark Friedman over ten years ago, RBA is a method of operation that begins with the population you serve and what you want to achieve in that population, letting that guide program setup and organizational operations thereafter. RBA has been succesfully used to "turn curves" in both programmatic performance, strategic performance, and population indicators worldwide in Education, Health, Justice, Environment, Housing, and more.

This presentation will also focus on the Clear Impact Scorecard software, a tool for facilitating and sustaining ongoing RBA thinking and practice in your organization's daily operations. The Clear Impact Scorecard software is Clear Impact's easy-to-use, web-based software that helps program managers, grant managers and performance directors collaborate with stakeholders and community partners to simplify data collections, standardize reporting, measure progress and improve performance at scale so that programs and organizations can move beyond reporting only on the quantities of people served and start demonstrating that their clients and communities are actually better off.