Citizens Voice Indicators Project

Miners used to carry a canary in a cage with them into the mines. The canary was more sensitive to the gases that could accumulate in the mines, and the condition of the canary served as an early warning for the miners when they were in danger.

Seattle, WA, has developed a set of “Indicators of Sustainable Community” which serve that region much as the canary in the mine served the miners. Each indicator provides a thermometer to measure the health of some aspect of the Seattle environment. It took a lot of discussion to arrive at these measures—there are a number of ways to measure any issue. Some potential measures are difficult to obtain, others cast too narrow a beam of light, some are ambiguous or do not reflect changes quickly enough. The goal was to arrive at a reliable set of measures that would also capture peoples’ imaginations.

At our January meeting, the participants decided to develop a set of indicators for Mankato. We decided to begin with the Seattle indicators, but also to look at other models and (in any event) to modify them to fit our region (the Seattle indicators, for example, include a measure of “wild salmon in area rivers”—we don’t have many of them here, although one person suggested we might measure “walleye in the Minnesota River”). We divided ourselves into subgroups, based on the divisions that Seattle used. The goal of each group is to come to a consensus about key indicators for our region, to identify ways to measure those indicators, and to begin to gather those data to determine whether the trend is up, down, or holding steady (or, in some cases, discovering that sufficient data are unavailable).

After those meetings, students at MSU Mankato took up the task of collecting data for the indicators that were identified. Their reports are included in the following links:

In 2006-07, Citizens’ Voices was involved in planning and pursuing a community-wide strategic envisioning process, called Envision 2020. As a result of the that project, MSU Students returned to the indicators that had been previously suggested, looking now for key benchmarks that would tie to the Envision 2020 strategies. Their reports are: