It's astounding to me that the 400th anniversary of the founding of Boston is coming up, but 2030 is the year.     

The Boston Foundation, together with the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, and untold numbers of cooperating organizations and individuals, began in 2000 to issue a series of reports that will culminate in 2030.

The Boston Indicators Project continues to convene community members, stakeholders, and experts every other year to consider questions such as:
  • How would we like Boston to look in 2030, the 400th anniversary of its founding?
  • If current trends continue, how will Boston look in 2030?
  • How can we think systemically about changes and interventions, such that Boston comes as close as possible to our ideal vision for 2030?
  • How can we democratize the data that we've collected about where we've been, where we are, and where we are going - so that it can foster discussion and action throughout our communities?
This is a project that is ambitious in the best sense of the word, and the decision to focus on launching the report on the web is an excellent one, considering that the Indicators Project team wants to encourage us to think about cross-cutting issues even while we are delving deeply into specific topics.  An online document can support this kind of multi-directional thinking much more easily than a paper document would.

It's a pleasure to be able to go to the 2004 Indicators Report, and click on the "civic health" tab.  In this area, a key indicator is "(1.9) Strength of the Nonprofit Sector," which of course is a topic close to my heart.  Not only am I shown bar and pie charts on nonprofit organizations in the area, but I am given an opportunity to view the original data set onscreen, or - even better - immediately download it in spreadsheet format.

This is an excellent tool for nonprofits and philanthropies - or for anyone who is concerned about the region's future. It's a way to encourage dialogue, and to give any participant in the the dialogue access to at least some of the data that is being used by planners and policy makers.  For example, if you have an  intuition that the neighborhoods in Boston with the highest rates of poverty also happen to be the neighborhoods with the largest percentages of the city's children, you can now check your assumptions.  Even better, as a community-based activist, you can now engage in advocacy that is backed by maps and numbers.

I hope that the Boston Indicators Project will serve as encouragement - to organizations in Massachusetts (who don't always collect data, but who are now receiving requests for it from the local community foundation), and to community leaders in other regions (some of whom haven't undertaken local indicators projects, but are now being asked how their regions compare with Boston).

Our region can do better - but our plans to do better should be based on a solid understanding of how we are doing now - and the Boston Foundation deserves a lot of credit for helping to make that possible.

Disclaimer: I am far from being a disinterested commentator on this topic.  Not only did I receive a free lunch on March 30, 2005 at the event celebrating the launch of the 2004 Boston Indicators Report, but the meal included crème brûlée for dessert.  Moreover, I served the Boston Foundation as a consultant on the 2002 Boston Indicators  Report, so my relationship with this project was at one time not only culinary but financial.