What are the vital signs of your local area?

We all know the formula:  leafy streets, excellent schools and low crime rates add up to a desirable area to live in, or so we’re told.

However, even within one area people’s experiences of where they live can vary enormously from that of their neighbours. These differences in experience can depend on a variety of elements including how much money people earn and how integrated they are into their local community. And there are also plenty of other factors that you won’t find on an estate agent’s website that can radically transform how it actually feels to live somewhere. Do older people have access to transport; are individuals engaged in local decision making; and how many people are homeless – these questions are vital to our lived experience of our communities.

As community foundations – local grant-making charities, set up to support community groups and small charities with funding and advice – we are finding that understanding these vital issues in our local communities is more important than ever. Local charitable giving is experiencing a resurgence, and donors have become increasingly interested in what’s happening on their own doorstep.

Our research shows that people are nearly twice as likely to feel confident that giving locally, as opposed to nationally, helps those who need it most, showing that donors are looking for their money to make a tangible local impact. Community foundations hold and distribute funds for donors who are passionate about their local area. Each foundation is effectively an expert on its own community to ensure that the funds the foundation holds are best positioned to support the area to thrive.

In 2013, for the first time, a successful initiative run by Canadian community foundations – Vital Signs – travelled across the Atlantic and was adopted by eight community foundations in the UK, starting with the Community Foundation for Tyne & Wear and Northumberland in May of that year.

This year, another two foundations joined the ranks, and in total the foundations in our Vital Signs working group produced ten community ‘health-checks’. Just like our Canadian counterparts, we used combinations of statistical data and community consultation to produce this yearly check-up on the health and vitality of our areas. We had in mind the same goal as the Toronto Community Foundation when it set up Vital Signs back in 2001: a way of helping residents, philanthropists and local decision makers really understand the strengths and challenges in the local area. Vital Signs reports measure communities against indicators including arts, culture and heritage; environment; healthy living; housing and homelessness; local economy and work.

The 2014 launch of Vital Signs in the UK this October highlighted issues in areas as diverse as Berkshire, Essex and Merseyside and often demonstrated the difference between national and local statistics. For example, children born today in some of Merseyside’s most deprived communities face the prospect of a significantly shorter life on average than their more affluent peers in other parts of the country.

A boy born in Liverpool has a life expectancy of 75.2 years compared to 78.8 years nationally – a difference of 3.6 years. Some reports also showed that in areas of perceived affluence such as Berkshire, there were pockets of real deprivation. In the last year, Wokingham was identified as one of the UK’s healthiest places to live and Windsor as home to the UK’s wealthiest. In contrast, several areas of Berkshire are within the top 20% for deprivation in the UK.

However, unlike other needs analyses, which focus only on statistics, Vital Signs reports ask the community how they feel, consulting with them on each issue and asking them for their qualitative and quantitative feedback. The reports also consider solving these problems and discuss how the community foundation involved is addressing the issues that are highlighted. In its work on Vital Signs in 2013, Milton Keynes Community Foundation discovered that disadvantage in the city was at far higher levels than expected, and that 20.6% of children in the city were living in poverty. This year, the community foundation has focused on the issue of child poverty and set up a fund, Eat Sleep Play Love, to try and encourage action in the area and to support local organisations helping families in poverty.

We expect to enlist more community foundations every year that we run the initiative, and we’re hoping that Vital Signs will continue to strengthen in the UK and provide more residents and community philanthropists with the ability to further understand where they live and how they can help the people who need it most.

All ten Vital Signs Reports can be found here: www.ukcommunityfoundations.org

• Written by Caroline Taylor and Cathy Elliott, co-Chairs of UK Vital Signs