Vital Signs - Community Health Check Launch

Launched by the Mayor, Cr. Judy Verlin, Vital Signs is a new initiative and a major program for The Ballarat Foundation. Ballarat together with four other Community Foundations in Australia will pilot the program, a community check-up, which measures the vitality of our communities.

Vital Signs gathers and publishes data on significant social and economic trends and assigns grades in areas critical to quality of life. It promotes awareness of community issues and is used by communities for social planning. Vital Signs gives each community foundation, its donors, and the community-at-large valuable insight into the community’s strengths, challenges and opportunities.

Based on a well established and highly regarded program conducted by the Community Foundations of Canada, Vital Signs is viewed as a benchmark model.

The ‘Report Card’, which will be a compilation of data and research from numerous sources, will help communities to make connections between issues and trends in different areas. The key themes are: Gap between rich and poor; Safety, health & wellbeing; Learning, Housing; Newcomers to our community; Arts & culture; Environment; Work and Leadership.

The Ballarat Foundation chief executive officer, Noel Trengove said, “The local report card is designed to get people and organisations discussing the next steps to build a better community.”

“Findings will be presented in a reader friendly, easy to understand format and will be published in the Ballarat Courier making them accessible to the whole community.”

“Year on year the community can quickly understand in which areas there is positive or negative movement. The release of the Vital Signs report card marks the beginning of a process, not the end.”

The program is supported by the City of Ballarat, the University of Ballarat, the Committee for Ballarat and importantly, the Ballarat Courier.

Professor Wayne Robinson, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Ballarat, said in a statement, “The University is particularly pleased to be able to provide expertise from its staff and students to research and analyse data from a number of sources and to provide comparison between differing communities across the nation.

The University is strongly committed to the region and considers that initiatives such as Vital Signs carried out in such a collaborative manner will be of significant benefit to the whole of the Ballarat community.”

Following this launch a reference group/steering committee made up of stake holders and including community representation will be established to further refine the model and lead the program.

The plan is that once established Vital Signs will be expanded to include other communities within our region, perhaps denoted by municipal boundaries.

It is hoped that the first ‘Report Card’ will be published before the end of the financial year.