In previous years, bits of Quadra and Cortes Island data have been incorporated in Campbell River’s Vital Signs Reports. This is the first year that both islands are collecting their own data. Cortes has already published its 2024 Vital Signs Report. The Quadra Island Foundation is about to start accumulating the baseline data that will enable it to produce a report for Quadra and the rest of Area C.
Jody Rodgers, Chair of the Quadra Island Foundation: “Vital Signs empowers organizations for tailoring their initiatives so they can work on things to improve, and also not spin their wheels on things that are already good. It also really gives them the hard data to apply for grants more effectively.”
“I think that it allows us to gain perspective on the differences in spending needs of organizations. Vital Signs is a vehicle for organizations to measure their effectiveness or lack thereof, according to certain benchmarks.”
“One of the problems that Quadra Island as a community has with respect to Vital Signs is it was always tucked in as this little afterthought to the Campbell River Vital Signs. They got our data from the surveys of Canada. Not only were they out of date, they were not very controlled because only certain people responded to the surveys. While it was a tiny little sidebar in their large report, I felt like it was non-data.”
“They also included Cortes and did the same sorts of things based on Surveys Canada. Cortes’ needs may be vastly different than Campbell River’s and ours, which is what we strongly suspect.”
Cortes Currents: Quadra Island’s needs are different from Campbell River?
Jody Rodgers: “Yes, that’s why Quadra wanted to break off from being a combined effort. I love the folks over at Campbell River Foundation. They are fantastic and they’ve been very generous to include Quadra in their Vital Signs report.”
Rodgers met with Michaela Arruda and Manda Aufochs Gillespie, Executive Directors of the Campbell River and Cortes Island Foundations, respectively.
“I gently said, we really want to go off and do this ourselves, if you don’t mind, because I think our community would appreciate that too. It’ll make it much easier for us to say to these grant writers, ‘we know you’ve given to XYZ. However we don’t share these resources. We are completely separate organizations and entities and communities.’ In view of the fact that our communities are unique, it seemed more sensible for us to be able to measure ourselves against ourselves.”
“There are 12 indicators that are part of the Vital Signs. They range from things that are extremely applicable like housing, economy and education, to things that are aspirational, like transportation.”
“We don’t really have very much money and these things take tens of thousands of dollars, if you are going to do it on your own.”
“I have to give a great shout out to my oldest daughter Carly, who is a recipient of a sociology PhD from Cambridge and lives in Brazil.”
“She said, ‘Hey mom, you guys don’t have any money. Graduate students and postgraduate students are always looking for things to do. Why don’t you ask around to academic institutions if you can partner for Vital Signs with them to get the questionnaires out?’”
“With that fantastic suggestion, I reached out and found an incredibly great match with Walter Lepore at University of Victoria. Not only had he worked with the Victoria Foundation on their Vital Signs, his specialty in the Department of Sociology at Victoria University is demographic data, is personal data. He has this wonderful postdoc candidate Alice Meyers who has deep connections to the environment and to First Nations. She’s from Ontario originally, but moved out here for various and sundry reasons. We’ve met with them a number of times.”
“Last February we reached out to the community. It was very evident that Vital Signs was going to be useful to the organizations. So we as a board said, okay, we’re going to do this and found Walter during the early summer.”
“We then met with leaders from those different community organizations and said, we have to filter out which of these 12 indicators you would like because this has nothing to do with Quadra Foundation. We’re just the vehicle. They helped us a lot. We had two different meetings, which were pretty well attended with different organizations’ leadership coming. During the second one, there was a wonderful opportunity in that an elder and a councilman from We Wai Kai Nation came.
“The subsequent behaviour on our part was to meet again with Walter and Alice. We sat down and talked about how the questionnaire would be formulated. They gathered 300 questions and then sent this mega-survey which, of course, is not what we would hand out to anybody because everybody would throw that in the recycle bin.”
“This past Friday, our board weeded it down to 114 questions, which is doable, but still a bit generous. Those questions will be polished, then the survey will be created and we’ll do an initial trial run. I’m not exactly sure how that will happen, but the intent is for it to come out this fall or winter to the community.”
“How it gets sent out is going to be multifactorial because there’s some people who have no internet access, or don’t want to do it by internet. Then there’s folks who are very well connected. So we’ll have various and sundry options to get the information out. Hopefully we’ll get a reasonable response.”
One of the beauties of these questions is that it’s possible to cross reference various things. I have a section that talks about well being and belonging and includes, ‘do you have a pet?’ Some people will answer, ‘yes.’ Then we have a section about, ‘are you worried about invasive species or other things?’ We find that there is an inverse correlation between pet ownership and worrying about invasive species.
“We have an organization that deals with trying to control the feral cat population on Quadra Island. There’s output from such questions that we could pass on to them and say, ‘by the way, we don’t know if there’s a causal relationship, but just an observation that there’s a schism between pet owners and pet not-owners about the concern about invasive species.’”
“It’s that kind of usefulness that this stuff would generate. Not the questions alone, but how they interact with each other. That will give us an idea of where we are at this time.”
“The report that gets created technically is not a Vital Signs report, because a Vital Signs report has to demonstrate change over time.
It will be a Vital Signs baseline, asking where is Quadra Island right now? It’ll have all the basic demographic information that Surveys Canada has, including economic stuff, but it also has some subjective things about people’s desires for transportation and their opinions about the condition of their homes . How much money do they spend on the upkeep, rent or mortgage of their home? Those sorts of things which are mentioned in surveys, but not quite so subjective.
It’ll come out in two phases, one this winter and one in the spring. We’re hoping to catch the seasonal visitors in the spring because they’re still a very important part of the community. The for-profit sector of Quadra wants to know what the behaviour is of these people because they do impact businesses a lot in the tourist season.”
“I think the hardest thing is going to be compliance with the surveys and the more community excitement that we can generate, the more compliance will get.”
“The communities in Granite Bay, Read Island and Sonora Island have people whose opinions are extremely valuable but it is an inconvenience for them to come to the more populated areas of Quadra Island to answer a questionnaire. They’re hard to get the data from because they’re pretty much homesteaders and may or may not have internet, and may or may not come down to get their mail in Heriot Bay every so often. We would like to reach out to them where they can get it.”
Links of Interest:
- Quadra Island Foundation website
- Quadra Island Foundation – News
- Articles about, or mentioning, the Quadra Island Foundation
Beach photo at top of page – courtesy Quadra Island Foundation website
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