As part of the Parkdale Community Economic Development (PCED) Planning project, we developed Parkdale Neighbourhood Wellbeing Indicators.
How do we know the local economy serves community needs and enhances community wellbeing? Conventional economic measurements such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are limited for this purpose as they tend to focus on economic growth. They also fail to consider complex social, cultural and ecological aspects that matter equally to the health of the economy and people’s daily life. This gap prompted us to develop a set of neighbourhood-based indicators to assess what matters to Parkdale as a starting point of community visioning for the PCED Planning project.
We conducted 8 separate workshops from May to June 2015. We engaged diverse community members – including PARC members, tenants, newcomers, immigrants, agency staff, cooperative members, residents in general and steering committee members – with a total of 97 participants. Based on the extensive community engagement and research, the 7 domains of Parkdale Neighbourhood Wellbeing Indicators (PNWI) were developed as shown above.
Each domain includes a set of indicators. Below is an example of Housing & Land Use.
**Special thanks to Catalyst Centre and Sally Miller for workshop design, as well as to Daniel Liadsky for finalizing the draft indicators and identifying data compatibility and data collection strategies.