DIASPORA
Communities around the world mimic Toronto’s Vital Signs Report,
The Vital Signs report is key to documenting issues and trends affecting Torontonians’ quality of life, but one of its biggest successes can be measured by how many communities have chosen to replicate the formula both here in Canada, and abroad.
The report is now being replicated in 53 communities in Canada and 22 communities around the world (in Australia, Brazil, Bosnia, the United Kingdom and the United States), and organizers are seeing results even after just a year or two.
Australia
Catherine Brown, CEO of Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation in Melbourne, first heard of Vital Signs in 2004, while attending a global symposium of community foundations in Berlin. Representatives from community foundations around the world had gathered to share ideas, and the Toronto Vital Signs Report “was one of the best ideas that I heard about,” Brown says.
In 2011, when she became CEO of Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation, Brown put establishing a local Vital Signs Report at the top of her to-do list. The first report was issued in 2014, and the initiative has helped her organization focus its efforts on three areas of need in Melbourne: Homelessness and affordable housing, youth unemployment, and food security.
Since that first report was published, the foundation has delivered funding to a homelessness service co-ordination project serving Melbourne’s inner city, among other housing-related programs; launched a program seeking innovative solutions to boosting employment for youth living with disabilities; and funded a lab at the University of Melbourne to investigate food systems across the city. Says Brown: “I refer to Vital Signs in every speech I give.”
United Kingdom
Cathy Elliott, chief executive of the Community Foundations for Lancashire & Merseyside (CFLM), had heard about Toronto’s Vital Signs Report before attending a Community Foundations of Canada conference in Vancouver in 2010.
“At the conference, I met with people from CFC who highlighted Toronto as the leader in Vital Signs globally,” Elliott says. “Toronto became the key example to adapt for a U.K. audience.”
What started off as a pilot project in 2011 and 2012 turned into a full-scale launch in 2013, when eight community foundations released Vital Signs Reports for the first time in the U.K.
In Lancashire and Merseyside, in the northwest of England, the report has helped inform local philanthropists and companies about such communities’ pressing concerns as the growing resource needs of an aging population. Typically, donors had been supporting youth-focused projects, Elliott says.
“Giving via the 50 funds and foundations we administer at CFLM has become more effective and focused,” she says. “We have developed a philanthropy fellowship for business leaders who debate every few months its findings to improve their personal and corporate giving.”
Since 2013, the number of U.K. community foundations compiling Vital Signs Reports has reached 14, which represents about 30 per cent of the community foundation network, according to Elliott. This includes the Community Foundation of Tyne & Wear and Northumberland, which was also part of the pilot program in 2013. Chief executive Rob Williamson says Vital Signs is “a powerful tool for inspiring new donors, evolving relationships with existing donors, and for levering additional resources into the region from funding bodies based in London.
“Vital Signs helps us be field agents for those foundations. We have also used it to shape how we apply our unrestricted resources.”
United States
Like their counterparts in the U.K., representatives of the Erie Community Foundation in Pennsylvania had heard about the Vital Signs Report during a meeting hosted by the Community Foundations of Canada. During that 2008 session, according to its president Mike Batchelor, Toronto was “highlighted as a bestpractice community.”
In December 2010, the Erie Community Foundation launched Erie Vital Signs, which Batchelor describes as “among the best things we have done.
“We needed to change the culture in our community so that it was normal to convene people around the same data points and it was normal for community decision makers to use the same language.”
Without this, he says, consensus decision-making “is impossible.”
To wit: information from healthcare data experts allowed decisionmakers to agree that school-based health centres were needed in the community. “Community Foundation leadership, and funding, helped make this a reality,” Batchelor says.
Vital Signs is now a part of everything the foundation does, he says. All grant applications, for example, must say what area of Vital Signs their project will impact. “We also convene topical experts in each Vital Signs indicator area to make sure we are tracking the correct data, to identify trends and, most importantly, to suggest one or two priority projects that might do the most to help our community,” he says.
Vital Signs Erie now partners with Penn State Erie and other local academic institutions to produce its report and ensure that its data is up-todate. Community foundations are ideally suited to these types of projects, Batchelor says.
“We can be neutral convenors, we can marshal resources, we can connect donors to causes they care about,” he says. “I’m a strong believer in Vital Signs projects and hope this movement spreads farther throughout the U.S. and the world.”