The Victoria Foundation is a charity aggregator (meta-charity?) in Victoria. Every year, they evaluate the city on different factors. This helps their fundraising pitch and I’d like to think it determines which local charities get their grants, although I have no idea if it does.

There’s an online survey asking which measures the Foundation should be using. It’s a good opportunity to tell them that perception of crime or police officers per capita are not worth basing decisions off of. It’s interesting to think about how things should be measured:

Arts and Culture

I suggested they measure the import/export of art. eg: How many foreign artists participate in our cultural festivals? (Fringe and Film Fest are the two I’m involved in.) To what extent are our local artists exhibited in other cities?

Belonging and Leadership

I liked their idea of measuring the economic value of volunteer contributions much better than counting volunteers or donations. They suggest measuring women in municipal politics, but obviously it would be better to look at the extent to which local politicians at all levels reflect the demographic makeup of the community on many Census dimensions.

Economy

Some interesting suggestions were business start-ups and failures, jobs by sector (economic diversity), and percent of people making a living wage. The latter is much more useful than looking at underemployment or minimum wage or whatever – can people get with however they’re able and opting to work?

Environment

They suggested measuring amount of land with regional ecological significance, which is way more useful than land in the Agricultural Land Reserve, which includes golf courses.

Getting Started

Since Victoria’s population is aging, total childcare spaces isn’t important: I’d rather see them measure the ratio of spaces to children. Similarly, the number of children in government care reflects government policies rather than the actual child poverty rate. And student debt doesn’t matter if graduates can find awesome jobs, so I’d like recent graduate income measured.

Standard of Living

They suggested the change of consumer price index compared to average wage increase, that’s an awesome way of measuring real income change controlling for inflation and supply.

None of the options that I like were in last year’s report, so go vote for what I say!