Advanced Practice 3: Citizens Reaching For Results
Jacksonville Citizens Define & Measure the Community’s Quality of Life
The Jacksonville Community Council Inc. (JCCI) has been issuing annual Quality of Life Reports every year since 1985, giving their northeast Florida community pictures of long-term trends for key quality of life issues. Citizens developed the indicators, have kept them relevant through occasional major revisions, and decide what to emphasize in each report. While JCCI staff facilitate the process and find data sources to determine which indicators are feasible, all decisions are made by diverse citizen committees. JCCI started out reporting the quality of life data for the consolidated City of Jacksonville-Duval County. In 1995, the United Way of Northeast Florida started funding annual JCCI citizen-driven reports on human service outcomes for the entire five-county region. Since 2002, these two reports have been merged into one annual report, and JCCI has been gradually expanding reporting on earlier indicators to also cover all five counties. JCCI’s annual Quality of Life Reports help keep citizens’ priority quality of life issues at the top of the public agenda.
How Jacksonville Community Council Inc. Helps Citizens Reach for Results
In partnership with the Chamber of Commerce, JCCI organized a steering committee in 1985 that identified nine major “elements” of the quality of life, from education, the economy, transportation, and the environment, to community health and safety, arts and culture, and social harmony. JCCI then recruited over a hundred diverse volunteers from across the community to serve on task forces to identify up to ten indicators for each element. JCCI staff research and invited stakeholders and experts helped the volunteers select indicators that were both relevant to citizen priorities and practical to report. Ten years later, JCCI organized citizens to drive a similar process to initiate human service indicators reporting. Since then, JCCI has organized citizen committees to enhance the indicators and reports to keep them relevant and useful, including the merger of the two annual indicator reports, and identification of long-term targets for improving priority indicators. JCCI also organizes media events for the release of each report, helping each year’s citizen Quality of Life Report Review Committee get press coverage for the issues it feels need public attention.
Although the indicators were developed separately from JCCI’s citizen policy study and advocacy process, JCCI has come to understand how these different systems can be made to work together as part of an overall, integrated process of community improvement. First, the quantification of key aspects of a community’s vision through a set of indicators aids in understanding important issues, which translates to improved learning by citizens in JCCI’s policy study process, which then informs their policy recommendations. After the JCCI implementation, the task force advocates for change and monitors community action, and any changes in the indicators over time inform future evaluation of whether the action was adequate to achieve the vision.
Citizen Roles in Community Improvement
Citizens have played important issue framer roles from the start of JCCI’s quality of life measurement and reporting, first as foundation builders in defining the major elements of the quality of life and picking the indicators that provided an initial vision of community well-being. Citizens have revisited this role over the years by developing human service indicators, targeting priority indicators, and making other enhancements of from time to time to keep the vision relevant to changing community conditions and evolving citizen priorities. Citizens engaged in each year’s reporting have also been evaluators of community conditions when they review data on indicator trends; then they are issue framers again as agenda setters who decide which trends should be emphasized in the release of each report. In those cases where citizens have used the indicators to inform policy study and implementation committees, as in studies of teen pregnancy and repeated education reform efforts, citizens have used the indicators to become more nuanced and insightful in their issue framing roles of defining problems and their evaluator roles to choose solutions to recommend. The indicator trends then give them data to support their roles of advocates for change, and later to be evaluators of results.
Additional Community Improvement Themes
JCCI has collaborated with three major partners: the Chamber of Commerce, the City of Jacksonville, and Northeast Florida United Way. The Chamber of Commerce partnered with JCCI to start the indicators project, and funded development of the indicators and the earlier years of annual reports. Now, the City of Jacksonville funds quality of life indicator reporting. The City has adopted a few of JCCI’s indicators in its own performance management, leading to a measure of accountability being achieved for improving those indicators. In 1995, Northeast Florida United Way funded development of JCCI’s human service-related indicators, and has funded annual reporting of data from the five-county region for these indicators. The human service indicators have become linked to resources and accountability as the regional United Way has used them to guide volunteers who help determine allocation of nearly $20 million in annual contributions. This has led United Way-funded agencies to use the human service indicators in their own strategic planning. JCCI also works with the Human Services Council, a collaboration of major public and private funders in northeast Florida (including United Way). The Council has built on the JCCI human service indicators to track a larger set of social outcomes, making human services funding in the region significantly more outcome focused.
- See a full List of Examples and Case Studies in Results That Matter
- Go to the Overview of Effective Community Governance or read Chapter 1 of Results That Matter for more on the advanced governance practices of the Effective Community Governance Model and related key community improvement themes.