Barrie, Ontario, is a rapidly growing community of about 200,000 roughly an hour north of Toronto. A key concern is how to manage growth in a way that preserves and improves the values and quality of life in the community.
The Barrie Community Health Centre (BCHC) created the first local Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW) group in Canada. They brought together a number of important organizations, including the county government, the United Way, the local community college, the public health unit, an environment network, and the school board. They call themselves the Resilience Collaborative. Their main goal is to reach out and engage large segments of the population that might not otherwise be involved in the decisions that shape their lives.
Whenever the CIW produces a national report on a specific wellbeing domain, the Resilience Collaborative piggy-backs its own report onto it that compares regional data to the national data and makes suggestions for local policy changes. So, for example, when the CIW released the Environment Domain Report in April 2011, the Resilience Collaborative released its own report the same day. Their effort was made possible by the Simcoe County government which provided a researcher who helped assemble and analyze all of the relevant regional data.
The report was followed several presentations about the reports to local citizen groups by the Chair of the Resilience Collaborative, Gary Machan.
At the end of the day what really matters is not so much the information, as much as it's a case of what you do with it,
Machan said.
And it is here that the involvement of the civic sector becomes absolutely imperative. I try to tap into the specific areas that people feel passionate about in our community. In Simcoe there is a great deal of interest in building more sustainable food systems, hence, we are working with a variety of stakeholders in crafting local food procurement policies both at the municipal and institutional levels.
The BCHC also incorporated a number of questions taken from the each of the domains of the CIW into their process for signing on new clients. They ask people about their income and education levels, access to friends and family, access to nutritious food, and their levels of time stress. Added Machan,
Not only does this provide us with a far better profile of who it is that uses our services, to which we in turn can be more responsive, but we are also finding that the very act of asking the questions performs a valuable educational function in terms of helping people connect the dots between their health and the determinants of health.