Measuring Progress: Community Indicators and the Quality of Life

As communities and local governments have become increasingly concerned about quality-oflife issues, community indicators have become a widely used tool to measure the status of the quality of life and progress being made toward improving it. Indicators provide a vehicle to understand and address community issues from a holistic and outcomes-oriented perspective. They are useful, within the context of an overall communityimprovement process, both as a planning tool, based on a community’s vision, and as an evaluation tool to measure progress on steps taken toward improvement. Their usefulness is maximized when they are both directly tied to public-policy and budget decision making and when the community feels a sense of ownership of the indicators through direct citizen involvement with them. This article summarizes major approaches and issues in the national and international communityindicators movement and then focuses on the experience of the Jacksonville (Florida) Community Council Inc., a pioneer and leader in the communityindicators movement.