Sustainable community indicators help measure progress towards achieving sustainability. Improve the quality of community-developed indicators and the ability of those indicators to be used by communities and individuals. Background and Approach Sustainable community indicators enable citizens to cooperatively consider what kind of communities they want and to plan for the future. More than 100 regions, states, counties, cities, and neighborhoods have begun to develop such indicators and the numbers continue to grow. This project supports these efforts and seeks to improve their effectiveness and quality with technical assistance and guidance.
Sustainable indicators link the social, environmental, and economic qualities of a community.
The main tasks in this project are training, technical assistance, and the development of materials that communities and organizations use to further their progress toward sustainable communities. These trainings are for people and organizations that are reaching out to communities on issues of sustainability or who are considering developing economic, environmental, or social indicators for a community. Trainees include people from nonprofit organizations, grassroots activists, and state and local government officials. The purpose of this oneday workshop is to increase participants' understanding of sustainability issues at the grassroots level and to provide community members with tools for initiating or furthering community indicator projects. The workshop has been given in three of the EPA's 10 regions and additional workshops are planned.