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Visit Jacksonville – City of Jacksonville

There is no shortage of groups and activists who want to move Baton Rouge forward. But not everyone has the same priorities, and success, or lack thereof, can be hard to define.

Coming up with a set of mileposts to guide our progress is the goal of Baton Rouge CityStats, an initiative of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation based on the efforts of the Jacksonville [Fla.] Community Council Inc.

JCCI was founded in the 1980s with the goal of measuring more than 1,000 quality-of-life indicators in a way that was data-driven, not anecdotal. Since then, the group has put out a yearly report that sets priorities for everyone from the Chamber of Commerce to the local United Way chapter.

The group’s work has influenced as many as 1,000 community organizations nationwide and been recognized by the United Nations and the European Union, according to Ben Warner, the group’s deputy director.

“Everybody’s using the same document, the same trusted source of information,” Warner says. “You get beyond the listing of what the problems are, and start thinking of solutions. … When they’re all paying attention to the same benchmarks, they know what they’re doing is making a difference.”

Warner will lead three public meetings in Baton Rouge. The first was scheduled for March 20; subsequent meetings will be held April 22 and May 13 at BREC Headquarters. Participants will decide what the community’s most significant need areas are and what relevant factors to measure. The foundation has contracted with the Baton Rouge Area Chamber to produce the research, and BRAF plans to issue the first report early next year.

“We expect other nonprofits and local governments to rely on the Baton Rouge CityStats project to deploy resources more effectively for community good,” BRAF Executive Vice President John Spain says. “After each annual report, the foundation plans to gather our donors and the community to provide solutions to problems flagged by the indicators.”

JCCI has visited three communities a year for more than 20 years, and Warner says people are often cynical at the beginning.

“We have all these studies, and they sit on a shelf,” is a typical comment, he says. “There’s no excuse for studies to sit on a shelf.” Before you can start talking, there has to be a commitment to implementation, and accountability methods have to be agreed on, up front. If everyone agrees, for example, that education is a problem area, the focus has to shift from what should they do about it [i.e. the school system] to what should we do about it.

Summing up an issue with statistics isn’t always possible, of course. Say a community decides that culture and the arts are lacking. It’s hard to measure something that subjective. But you can come up with a few indicators, like attendance at cultural events, or the number of arts facilities, that might not tell you everything about the health of the arts scene, but tell you something, Warner says. If those indicators are moving in the right direction, that’s probably a good sign.

One Voice for Volusia, a 3-year-old group based in Daytona Beach, Fla., has a different take on the JCCI model, focusing strictly on social services.

“It’s the first time we’ve had a systematic way to measure something at the macro level,” Executive Director Carrie Baird says.

The biggest frustration so far has been that there are things they would like to measure, such as the level of social services for the elderly, but there is no public source of information, she says.

Jacksonville Community Council Inc.

STRAIGHT TALK: Ben Warner (left), deputy director of the Jacksonville [Fla.] Community Council Inc., addresses a meeting at The Bridge of Northeast Florida, an organization that helps children and teenagers from impoverished neighborhoods remain in school, improve their academic performance and avoid pregnancy, delinquency and recidivism.

“Things people assume are being measured by someone are not,” she says.

Sarasota County Openly Plans for Excellence, or SCOPE, has been around since 2001.

One of its biggest challenges early on was overcoming the assumption that SCOPE represented developers or some other specific group, but Executive Director Timothy Dutton is proud to say the group is widely known as neutral and independent.

Sarasota County has the highest percentage of senior citizens in the country, he says, and the indicators produced by SCOPE have helped lead to funding commitments for a transportation network for seniors, among other quality of life measures.

“We think we’re about trying to build active citizenship,” Dutton says.