Community, Education, Family, Housing, Jobs

The 2024 Vital Signs Report for Cortes Island

The Cortes Island Community Foundation (CICF) just published the Cortes Island’s Vital Signs report.  

“ When I started with the Community Foundation a few years ago, I  was already in the community, trying to make things happen. In particular, I tried to make things happen in the most grassroots  small nonprofit ways possible, but often in the area where I saw that there was a lot of need. Very quickly, I was in the process of writing grants and trying to figure out how to bring in those resources that I knew were out there somewhere,” explained Manda Aufochs Gillespie, Executive Director of the Cortes Foundation. 

“We’re all being taxed the same as someone who lives in the city more or less, but when you look around, we don’t have transit and fancy bike lanes and we don’t have subsidized housing like the cities have. So I said, I know that there’s money out there. There must be a way to bring some of that money here to Cortes. One of the things I realized very quickly is that we did not have data related to Cortes. Volunteers on the island would be like, ‘ we clearly have a housing crisis’ but how do we try to express that because no one believes that rural communities at the time had a housing crisis.  By and large, the data that was available to us had us lumped in with the entire Strathcona Regional District, including Campbell River.”

“If you look at child vulnerability rates in Campbell River, they’re looking at available childcare spots: What kind of resources are going into after school programming for the youngest? What kind of early literacy programs there are? What kind of food bank supports are available for families with young kids?” 

“When we tried to see how our young kids were doing, there was basically nothing.  I would be talking to Desta Beattie, at the family services on Cortes, and she would say, ‘I cannot get them to give us funding for a head start program, because I cannot show them that we have any particular need.’”  

Manda Aufochs Gillespie, Executive Director of CICF

“When I started working with the Community Foundation, a few years ago, I learned about  Vital Signs and Vital Signs are usually done by community foundations with a lot more resources. Community foundations told the stories of needs and opportunities specific to their communities because  a community foundation’s job is to help bring the resources that a community needs to thrive and bring the knowledge of how best to leverage those resources into the hands of the community.”

“I was like, ‘we need to start with understanding what the opportunities are,  what the needs are and what an amazing thing that this Vital Signs tool exists.’  The Vital Signs tool is largely just a framework for looking at the health of the whole community.”

“It has taken us a number of years to be able to come up with enough capacity and financial wherewithal to do it. I was told recently by one of the people who helped us with this project that we are, as far as she knows, the smallest community foundation to ever do a Vital Signs of this size.”

“We specifically tied our Vital Signs into the release of the Campbell River Vital Signs. That beautiful community foundation offered to support us in a number of ways. One of the biggest ways was that they gave us a page in their print document because we are many thousands of dollars away from having the resources to do our own print document.”

The Cortes Ilsand page in Campbell River’s Vital Signs Report

“We have this page that’s going to thousands of people in and around the Campbell River area, including our representatives that sit on the Board for the Regional District and other government officials who make funding decisions for us. They get to see one page about Cortes, amongst the other things, and a link to our whole report, which is on our website.”

Christina MacWilliam, Co-Chair of the Community Foundation, added, “It was something that Manda  was like a dog with a bone. ‘We really needed to do this thing called Vital Signs!’ Now, I just think  in terms  of human health. They ask about someone’s vital signs,  their blood pressure, their heart rate. What Manda’s saying is, how can you tell the health of a community if you  have a sense that it’s not feeling great, but you don’t have the data to explore further. In the process of actually doing this Vital Signs data  compilation work with Manda and others, I’ve really come to understand why she was so adamant that this is one of the first things that we had to do as a community foundation.  It’s now something that lives and breathes on our website.” 

Cortes Currents: How did you collect your data?  

Manda Aufochs Gillespie: “Most Vital Signs reports rely a fair amount on available data, such as census data and other large scale  survey type things  that are done sometimes in combination with school districts.  We have a big one that is done with our Campbell River School District around teenagers and their general health, etc.” 

Cortes Island Academy Students

“A lot of the data is just taking what is available, but a lot of those big data sources such as the census, won’t reveal detailed information about small communities because it’s considered  a breach of privacy. For instance, on Cortes, there are two families whose net worth is over a billion dollars. It wouldn’t be hard in a community like ours to figure out who that is. So  they obfuscate a lot of the detailed information. That includes everything from how many of our  youth on the island are struggling with  mental health issues, not having access to free high school education, with drug use, etc. We don’t know because we can’t get the information here.” 

“The second part of our data collection process was that we hired Maggie Kwan, who I found because she’d been working with Campbell River to do their Vital Signs, Salt Spring Island Community Foundation to do their Vital Signs and been part of the Campbell River Health Network. I have loved the release of information that they did about 10 years ago on Cortes since the moment I saw it. It’s a beautiful report that looks at all these different health indicators, and goes in depth about what we know, what we don’t know, and the  many things that we can’t say again about Cortes because we don’t have data.  It was just handled with such intimacy and a deep understanding of the stories and the diversity of a small community.  I’ve always wanted to know who did that report. One of the people involved was Maggie, so that’s who we hired.” 

“With what we could pull off at our scale and with our financial resources, she recommended that we do a survey.”

“The thing about survey data is that  it’s not a hundred percent of the people, but the beautiful thing in a small community  is if you can get enough of the community to do it, you know, that with like +95% accuracy it is  true for most of the island.” 

“I wanted to ask about everything  because I was like, ‘this is our chance. There will be nothing unturned. Right? We will talk about housing. We’ll talk about youth. We’ll talk about aging on the island. We’ll talk about transportation etc.’ Everybody said, ‘no, no, you can’t ask that many questions or nobody will fill it out.’ Well, guess what? We did ask that many questions. I would have asked even more, but they didn’t let me just totally have my way.” 

“We needed to have 295 people fill it out to have the highest rate of reliability and assurance that this is  true for the island. We had over 320. People take time to fill in this report, they put in quotes and their own feelings and thoughts.  I feel like they poured their stories into this report for us. It was the most beautiful offering from such a beautiful diversity of people. Many are working three jobs,  have children at home, and,  every moment really counts. They stopped and they did this.”

Christina MacWilliam: “I agree with Manda.  It wasn’t just a cursory ‘check the boxes’ thing.  As often happens on Cortes, when people show up for town hall meetings or any other event, they bring themselves forward.”

“One of the things about the report that I think is most engaging  is the inclusion of those voices and those quotes that Manda referred to. I think we’re all drawn to stories more than data,  just  by our nature. You can look at pie charts, data and graphs and some people just love that stuff , but  for a lot of us, it’s not true.”  

Christina MacWilliam, C o-Chair of the CICF

Cortes Currents: Give me some examples of those quotes. 

Christina MacWilliam: “Okay, I’m just whipping through them. On housing and economic disparities, one of the quotes was ‘good people who I considered my community have  been forced to leave the island due to a lack of available and affordable housing.’” 

“In respect to what we call community belonging and engagement, one of the quotes was, ‘there’s a great spirit of volunteerism on this island, and lots of folks are generous with their time and resources.’”

“This was along with some other quotes that talked about an increase in what they felt was a polarization and a lack of respectful discourse. I would love to see less us versus them, meaning residents and visitors and newcomers, at least see less of that energy and more working towards upgrading infrastructure to accommodate all who want to spend time here.’” 

“There were people writing about what draws them to our community, I’ve seen a deeper sense of togetherness and community members coming together in times of need and in times of celebration.” 

Christina MacWilliam: “One more on education because I think  that’s a big thing that sets Cortes Island apart from the data out of Campbell River:  ‘My children are grown. Education on the island was definitely a mixed bag, public alternative home and leaving the island. Cortes can be wonderful for young children, but can be a challenge for older children without either financial resources or time.’”

Manda Aufochs Gillespie:  “The report is a very beautiful 28 pages on our website.  Whether or not you are a story person or whether you’re a pie graph person,  there is something for everyone in this report and lots of things where you don’t have to do a lot of reading. You could just sit down with it for a few minutes and get a few highlights.”

“I want to just tell you the breadth of what we looked at, so  you can get a sense of what’s in there. We start with looking at community belonging and engagement. Then we look at learning, then income. work and economy,  what’s happening with housing specific on our island, health and wellness of the people of our island,  safety,  environment on our island, leisure, and getting around or transportation. We also talk a little bit at the end about what next and throughout we’ve pulled out a bunch of quotes  from stories that people told when they were filling out the survey.” 

Cortes Currents: How will what you found bring about change? 

Manda Aufochs Gillespie: “Having information empowers us when we understand both the opportunities but also the reality. So let me tell you a couple of the realities that I think are on the harder side that came out in this report that maybe people know, but maybe they don’t.” 

“A quarter of our population is very low income. On our island, we have double the number of people in extreme poverty  than the rest of the regional district and the rest of the province.  We have less than half as many families earning over $100,000 on our island, compared to the Regional District and the province. So we have less of a strong middle class and more people entrenched in really low income lives.”

“Very significant changes that have happened from 2006 to 2021: we have  less employment, our household income has tended to go down, and we have become an older population with significantly fewer youth living here. Women on the island earn 32% less than men. There’s quite a bit of people who consider themselves underemployed who would like to find more work and better paid work, but can’t.”

“We already know a significant number of people whose housing situations are vulnerable either because they’re paying so much of their available income on rent, or because they could not, if they left their houses,  afford to rent any sort of equivalent. Quite a few of our seniors are house poor. They struggle to meet even their monthly living expenses, medicine, food, etc.  They have houses that are often falling apart around them or they can’t  translate that house into a recognized value. If they sold the house, they would have to leave Cortes. There would be nowhere for them to move to.”  

“Those were a few of the things that stood out as things that as a community, we don’t want to have be the defining features. I think all those suggest opportunities.”

“We have amazing nonprofits on this island, working tirelessly, and tons of volunteers and people who are paid as if they were volunteers doing the amazing work  of holding together our community. My hope is that this information will allow us to tell better stories to bring more funding to those organizations  that have been working to move these things in a positive way.”

Christina MacWilliam: “Manda, another staff person,  another board person and I attended something recently in Vancouver.  It was a conference bringing together community foundations from all across BC.  Because we have this foundation now,  our island can come to the table with some pretty  big players. The more we have to flesh out the story of Cortes, not just the light side, but some of the shadow side as well, we start to create a network and hopefully we’ll be able to access more resources for the island in a more targeted specific way.” 

Manda Aufochs Gillespie: “Sometimes I will get stuck in talking about the needs, the gaps, the things that really move me.  I’ve been quite surprised in my work with the community foundation, such as doing the giving well project  last year. I had no  idea how much I would see about how hard life is  for quite a few people that we see as neighbours and that show up beautifully in so many different ways. We have no idea what that’s costing them: how they’re living, what they’re living without. You can hear me choking up a little bit, it’s hard because I feel like I need to be out there trying to help that situation.” 

“Vital Signs helped show us where those areas are, but you know what else the Vital Signs showed us?  We are a community where we have neighbours that love being here, that feel overwhelmingly like they belong  and they volunteer when they can’t volunteer because they’re working three jobs and they have kids at home. They still look in on their neighbours, take them food, plant extra flowers for them in their garden. They stop and ask people if they want rides when they see them walking. They spend their energy caring about each other. They feel safe in their homes.” 

 “This actually is a scarce thing in the world. Every day  almost everyone is participating, whether they have any resources or not, whether they’re completely stressed out or have way too much time on their hands, they are making this community and giving to a community that greets each other, supports each other, lends each other a cup of sugar, whether or not they like that other person or not, because we feel like we’re in it together.”

 “That is irreplaceable, and we have to protect it. That does not just happen accidentally, and in much of the world, it has disappeared. So I think the first thing we have to do is recognize and celebrate that we make choices, and we have sacrificed much to stay on this island, and we really are practicing the art of community in a beautiful way.”

Christina MacWilliam:   “After hearing what Manda just said in terms of encapsulating the sense of community that Cortes  exemplifies across all kinds of  boundaries, I think about my own neighbours. A report  is helpful, but  people do Vital Signs on Cortes all the time with their neighbours,  around land, and  species.  Look at  the work that FOCI does around species at risk.  Vital Signs are being taken all the time on the island by individuals and organizations.  This is just one way of expressing what we have done and it’s happening in the community all the time.” 

Manda Aufochs Gillespie: “I hope that there’ll be lots more interviews and opportunities to make this data really about what it is, which is storytelling and telling these stories of all these neighbours that we love and live with on Cortes.”

As Manda just mentioned, there will be more stories on specific subjects identified in the Vital Signs report, but you are also free to access it for yourself by clicking on the link below.

Links of Interest:

All graphs and inserts taken from the 2024 Cortes Island Vital Signs Report

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