What is Vital Signs?
The Ballarat Foundation is embarking on a new initiative, a major program for the foundation. We have joined with four other Community Foundations in Australia to pilot the Vital Signs 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 Community Foundations in Canada, Vital Signs was initiated by the Toronto Community Foundation. It is highly successful and is viewed as a benchmark model. Vital Signs has been licensed in Australia to Australian Community Philanthropy Limited.
How it works
The ‘community report card’, will be a compilation of data and research from numerous sources, which will help the community to make connections between issues and trends in different areas. key themes could include: Gap between Rich and Poor, Safety, Health & Wellbeing, Learning, Housing, Newcomers to Our Community, Arts & Culture, Environment, Work and Leadership.
Findings will be presented in a reader friendly format published in the Ballarat Courier, making the information assessable to the whole community. The local report card is intended to get people and organisations thinking about and discussing the next steps to build a better community.
Year on year the community will be able to 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 Ballarat Foundation is very proud to have support from the City of Ballarat , the University of Ballarat , the Committee for Ballarat, DPCD and the Ballarat Courier.
The first report is due to be published late in 2010.
