New Edition: Canada’s Community Economic Development Magazine

Posted by on February 20, 2004

The new edition of “Making Waves: Canada’s Community Economic Development Magazine” offers special coverage of the use of indicators and benchmarks in community economic development. Find a summary of its contents below. For more information, including sample articles from this and past editions, visit http://www.cedworks.com (go to “Making Waves”).

Apologies for cross-postings.

CONTENTS

SMARTER COMMUNITIES
Benchmarks and indicators, if well designed, applied, and managed, can have a major payoff in local empowerment and revitalization. Paul Reed, senior social scientist at Statistics Canada, makes the case not for “indicator projects,” but for building community information infrastructure.

INDICATORS AT WORK
What’s the venue for your use of indicators? A social enterprise? A development corporation? At whatever scale you intend to apply indicators, five tasks are key.

WHAT REALLY WORKS
To judge the effectiveness of a project or program fairly, track its performance on the one hand, and on the other, the results which it and other initiatives are intended to realize.

DOWN WITH DYSFUNCTIONAL MEASUREMENT!
Public policy and programs in local development tend to see the trees, but not the forest – the realization of vital, self-reliant communities. Here are two frameworks that will connect public investment to real progress in community renewal among Aboriginal Canadians.

WORKS IN PROGRESS
When indicators get applied to community development, there is a trade-off between technical standards and local engagement. Too often that trade-off favours the former. Two initiatives in the Pacific Northwest show how to make indicators integral to community-based planning and change.

BEST PRACTICE BLUES
What’s the point of a Best Practice so good that no-one can afford to use it? A CED practitioner looks for ways to re-introduce practicality to social accounting.

Don McNair
Making Waves: Canada’s CED Magazine
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