The purpose of this section is to provide participants with an opportunity to develop potential indicators for a sustainable community and get feedback from other participants on how to make an indicator better. By the end of this section, the participants will have experience discussing the issues of sustainability and providing feedback to others on indicators.


Tips for Teaching/Key Elements

The important concepts to emphasize are:

1) Start with the vision or description of sustainability and use that to come up with ideas for indicators.

2) Think about the linkages between the issue and other areas.

3) When brainstorming ideas, don't dismiss indicators because the data does not currently exist. Indicators that are relevant to sustainability--but for which no data exists--are better in the long run than indicators that are not relevant to sustainability no matter how much data exists.

4) A sustainable community goal cannot involve making a community better by making another community worse off.

5) Look at the indicators from several viewpoints or frameworks--theme based, pressure-state-response, natural-human/social-built capital, goal based--to see if you have a well balanced set of indicators.

6) Develop a way to evaluate indicators that works for your community.

7) Think about who might already be collecting the data or monitoring that facet of the community.