Albany’s Vital Signs: Initial report the start of something bigger for the betterment of the community

Those behind the first Vitals Signs report on Albany will watch how the city puts it to use over the coming years before they decide how to improve the next one. The report, driven by the Albany Community Foundation, presents a snapshot of the community’s health across a range of indicators. Vital Signs project co-ordinator Katie Arbuckle said decisions on what to include in the report were guided by principles of connections, conversations and continuity. “Does it connect to other statistics, does it spark conversations and can it be measured over time,” she said. The final statistics shown in the report represent those deemed most useful to the community, but were far from everything the four focus groups found on their respective topics. Several areas of data — such as underemployment and a gender breakdown of the participation rate — proved difficult to drill down on. “Getting data on vulnerable groups was certainly also very hard,” Ms Arbuckle said. “Some of that left me a little unfulfilled because of how difficult it was to get some of that data. “But on a positive of things we saw lots of examples of where things have improved as well, but on a macro level rather than at local levels.” ACF’s James Leiper said he was determined that the report is not left to sit on a shelf. “If we see that it’s starting to not be used, we’ll be out there pounding the pavement and asking people how we can get them to use this or the next one,” he said. “We’ll be looking at further funding to do it again in a way where we can delve into more stats.” He said it was important the report was improved over time because it would reveal a lot about the community that might otherwise go unnoticed. “You can’t know where the problems or even the opportunities are until you draw them out,” he said.