Does Your Community Meet the Needs of Its Members?

Everyone needs food to eat, water to drink, air to breathe, clothes to wear, a house to live in, and energy to heat and cool it just to survive. And to assure sustainability, add safety, health, and education for good measure. Communities where people live have the same imperative. Either they provide the means by which members can meet their needs or they outsource the responsibility to others some distance away. In the former, communities are on a sustainable path whereas in the latter community survival is put at risk when needs cannot be met.

Needs met is the universal measure of success and sustainability of any community. Does your community meet the needs of its members? To find out, take a quick survey of your community by considering the following three questions:

• Any community members hungry; homeless; living in unhealthy and unsafe conditions; or are they confronted with no paid work; illness; limited healthcare, and inadequate life skills to influence their circumstances?
• How do you and your community keep score on needs met?
• What are you and other community members doing to impact the scorecard?

The answers to these questions speak loudly. If your community is like most, the answer is “Yes” to the first one. It’s almost impossible to eliminate these conditions. However, the next two answers tell the tale as to whether your community is on track to sustainability.

Their order is important. Tom Peters is quoted as saying, “What gets measured, gets done.” As a community addresses the issues identified in the first question, the answers to the second question are calories of food, gallons of water, kilowatts of energy, cubic feet of fuel, units of housing, tonnage of recovered waste, etc. Those metrics shape answers to the third question in the form of infrastructure projects and business cases that deliver outputs according to the scorecard.

In effect, how a community responds to these three questions highlights economic choices made by community members. Those responses can be mapped onto a flow diagram, such as the one below, to give an overview of the local economic system for the community.

In the local economic system above, the drive for local economic sustainability precipitates flows of community assets and work functions that increase in their range of application and depth of value-add as they proceed to a community investment portfolio loaded with infrastructure projects and business cases that, when launched, generate calories, gallons, kilowatts, units, etc., in an effort to meet the needs of community members.

By placing their emphasis on how to meet their needs, community members take ownership for their sustainability. This commitment frames opportunities to charter projects and develop businesses. It also establishes a local economic context for business models that are based on widespread participation.

So, what’s the scorecard for your community? Calories in meals or community gardens? Gallons of water or number of water meters? Kilowatts of power or utility bill assistance? Housing units or vouchers? And so it goes… How does your local economy rate in terms of progress toward community sustainability? Are unemployed and underemployed community members engaged in paid work through local businesses and organizations whose outputs help meet local needs?

These are topics for further consideration in future posts. Stay tuned…

Originally posted to Sustainable Local Economic Development on Tumblr by Steve Bosserman on Wednesday, September 1, 2010