The American News Service Article #26 1034 words

Communities Choose Their Own Leading Indicators of Progress
by Mark Bushnell LEBANON, N.H. (ANS)

 They read like headlines in a secret code. Dow drops 10
points. Durable goods orders up 3 percent. Index of Leading
Economic Indicators drops .1 percent. The figures may hold
some meaning for economists, but they leave many people
wondering, What does this mean for me, my family, my
friends, my neighbors? From the Northwest, to the Midwest,
to the Southeast, people are devising new indicators to
gauge more accurately the health of our economy, our
culture, our environment.

About 150 people  from baseball-cap-wearing teenage boys to
gray-haired grandmothers  spent a recent Saturday in a hotel
conference room here doing just that. The day was devoted to
thinking about the future. Entitled Valley VitalSigns, the
project is designed to create a list of quantifiable
indicators to help the roughly 90,000 people of the upper
Connecticut River valley understand how the region evolves.
Known locally as the Upper Valley, the area consists of 37
communities in Vermont and New Hampshire. Once almost
entirely rural, many Upper Valley hamlets now serve as
bedroom communities for larger towns nearby. With an eye
towards charting the areas well-being  including such
intangible community characteristics as trust, commitment,
and beauty participants came up with an array of possible
indicators, or VitalSigns, ranging from the practical to
the fanciful. 

They included: The number of working farms; The percentage
of businesses that are locally owned; The quality of the
water; The percentage of people who volunteer; The number
of local children who grow up and settle here; The distance
from the center of each community to an unobstructed field
of stars. 

Information can lead to action, said VitalSigns Co-Chair
Betty Porter of Norwich, Vt. We, individually, have a gut
feeling that things arent going well, but we dont have
information to support that feeling, Porter said. If enough
people care about the number of good-paying jobs or locally
owned businesses, or clean air, they can mobilize now that
they have the hard information. 

Organizers hope organizations and local governments will
use the VitalSigns to monitor regional trends and look for
ramifications affecting them. Or they hope local leaders
might create their own indicators to monitor other
important local issues. Valley VitalSigns is a project of
the The Upper Valley: 2001 & Beyond, an initiative started
in 1993 by the areas League of Women Voters. League members
were looking to follow up on a series of group discussions
15 years ago which led to concrete results, including a
local transit system. They decided to use indicators after
being inspired by a newspaper editorial about a similar
project in Seattle. There, the leading indicators now
include the number of good air days each year (73 in 1980;
315 in 1994) and the number of hours the average worker
must put in each month just to cover the bare essentials
for a family of four (80 and holding steady). 

After the brainstorming session produced a number of
proposed indicators, participants at the New Hampshire
gathering divided into 14 working groups to continue
discussing the VitalSigns and add more to the list. The
groups covered such topics as personal and public safety,
agricultural and forestry, human services, transportation,
citizen participation, and arts and culture. As
participants talked among themselves, observers from
California, New York, Maine, and Massachusetts  as well as
several from the eastern European republic of Slovakia 
studied the process with the thought of trying similar
programs in their own communities.

At days end, some groups had gotten further than others.
The health care group, for example, had successfully
narrowed its list to five indicators. The environmental
quality groups work was slower. This didnt surprise Geoff
Dates, a participant and a scientist with a national
environmental organization. Especially concerning the
environment, he said, its difficult to strike a balance
between what will capture peoples hearts and what is
scientifically accurate. My main concern with these
projects is oversimplification. 

The list of proposed indicators will be circulated around
the community  to business groups, to volunteer boards, to
teachers  for suggestions. After the remaining indicators
go through a technical review to assure data is available
to chart them, they will be published in the fall. Then
VitalSigns staff and volunteers will recruit organizations
willing to adopt each indicator. Business groups, for
instance, might record the number of locally owned
businesses, while an environmental organization would chart
air quality. 

Getting people to agree on ways to measure progress is a
good way to find our common ground, said Alan AtKisson, a
founder of Sustainable Seattle and consultant to the Upper
Valley project. Projects like Valley VitalSigns and
Sustainable Seattle are part of an international movement
that encourages sustainaibility  long-term planning that
takes into account the economic, environmental and social
costs and benefits of actions. Such countries as Holland,
Germany, New Zealand and Australia use them to help guide
national policy, AtKisson said. And here in this country
some cities and states are beginning to put the new
indicators to use. An indicators project in Jacksonville,
Fla., the first in the country, charted the high schools
graduation rate. When townspeople discovered it was
sinking, they attacked the problem and have raised the
graduation rate by 10 percent in the last decade. In
Minnesota, a state planning office uses almost 80
indicators  termed Minnesota Milestones  to grade the
states progress and recommend changes in resource
allocation and policies. 

I dont know what happened in the 20th century that made the
U.S. stop thinking about the future, AtKisson told the New
Hampshire gathering. We have to overcome this legacy that
is summed up on the bumper sticker on large RVs `Im
spending my childrens inheritance. As if that were
something to be proud of. Though Americans have gotten away
from the idea of sustainability, of worrying about future
generations, AtKisson said the movement is making strides.
I like to compare it to democracy. When people first
started out talking about it, they thought it was a
principle you could never enact, he explains. We are much
lower on the learning curve (with sustainability), but we
are learning fast. The point here is to make sure the world
we hand on is at least as good as the world we came into. 

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Mark Bushnell is assistant Sunday editor for the Sunday
Rutland Herald and Times Argus in Rutland, Vt.