Vital Signs: Convening a Community to Understand Itself

Convening, engagement design & community research

Every community makes decisions about where to direct time, money, and energy. Too often those decisions rest on assumptions rather than evidence and on the voices already at the table rather than the ones missing from it. The Westlock Community Foundation set out to change that with Vital Signs: a community-wide needs assessment built to surface what residents actually needed, in their own words.

The work was an act of convening. We brought together a Community Leadership Committee spanning local government, family and community services, child care, and frontline resource organizations: Westlock County, the Town of Westlock, the Village of Clyde, FCSS, and others, and aligned them around a shared question and a shared process. Getting eight organizations to steer one project, rather than run eight parallel ones, is the quiet work that makes community research credible.

From there, we designed for participation, not just data collection. A community survey opened the door widely, inviting residents to weigh in on quality of life across the issues that shape it. We then convened a Design Lab, bringing residents and leaders back to the table to interpret the findings together, pressure-test what the data meant, and shape the response. Building on the community's earlier "Bridging the Gap" baseline, this kept the work grounded in local knowledge rather than parachuted-in analysis.

The result was the Vital Signs report: a clear, evidence-based picture of community needs and a set of recommendations the community had a hand in shaping. More than a document, it gave local leaders a shared, trusted foundation to direct resources where they'd have the greatest impact, the difference between guessing at what a community needs and knowing.

Vital Signs was led by the Westlock Community Foundation. Katie Robertson was the lead on the project while the Executive Director at WCF.