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Pointing in the Right Direction
Fort Collins Coloradoan
July 13, 2002
Columns

How do we know what’s really going on in our community? How can we identify accurately where help is needed? And how do we know, when we provide help, that our efforts are effective?

These questions have always been difficult to answer - for any non-profit organization or county service. One of the traditional ways of assessing the impact of a particular service on the community is to generate a survey. Across the county, this would often lead to a collection of many unrelated surveys, each with vastly different methodologies, measurements and styles. The surveys could be expensive and time consuming for each organization. It also meant that for any countywide analysis of the area’s health in general, it was often difficult to reconcile and compare the different results.

Last year, United Way and Larimer County Division of Health and Human Services, with the help of numerous local partners, launched a revolutionary tool that makes it easier, cheaper and more reliable to assess the well-being of our county. Named Compass, this web-based tool provides continuously updated reports on a range of significant wellness indicators that anyone can use: non-profits, the city, the county or even the individual.

United Way took a leadership role in helping provide the Compass tool and uses it regularly in making strategic decisions about how to best have an impact on the community. Gordan Thibedeau, our local United Way’s Executive Director, was quick to embrace this project from the outset. "It’s important to understand where our community is today," he says. "Compass helps us establish our community needs and direct our dollars to meeting those needs."

The basic idea is that if we understand what’s happening in our community, we should better be able to solve our problems, and not just agency by agency. Compass will lead non-profit and funding organizations towards greater collaboration, and because they will all be working from the same data source, resolution of community problems should be more effective.

Linda Bobbitt, Compass Project Director, explains that Compass is an ever-expanding collection of charts, graphs and reports in one place that reflect all the aspects of our county. It includes data that go back ten years, and compares Larimer County to other county, state and national statistics.

"We’ve developed an index to pull together information into categories," Linda says, "so we can get a picture of how we’re doing in the community."

This index illuminates weak and strong spots as well as developing trends in five health and human service categories. For example, from current data we can see that we’re doing well on economic and educational health compared with neighboring counties, but youth alcohol abuse and lack of affordable housing are significant concerns.

United Way also hopes to use Compass to identify where we want our community to be in five years’ time. As well as solving problems that already exist, Compass should help planners anticipate problems based on trends and be able to take steps to prevent them.

Check out the Compass website at: www.larimer.org/compass

-By Meg Brown a.k.a.: Sophie Waghorn

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