The History, Status and Future of the Community Indicators Movement

This introductory chapter to the volume provides an overview of the history of community indicators, beginning with a grant provided by the Russell Sage Foundation in 1910 to the Charity Organization Society (of New York) to survey industrial conditions in Pittsburgh, and moving to present day. As a social movement, we present community indicators efforts as being grounded in challenges and innovations within the distinct but overlapping domains of public administration, social work and philanthropy, community development, sustainable communities and environmental justice, happiness and wellbeing studies, and data analytics. Each frames and pursues the task of crafting and disseminating indicators of community conditions in a different way, resulting in a richly diverse field of practice and theory, that the Community Indicators Consortium seeks to serve and promote. In so doing, the Community Indicators Consortium recognizes that uniting these diverse approaches in community indicators provides a forum in which to pursue common themes of work, including the need to amplify the voice of disadvantaged communities, to seriously explore the increasing use of information technology, to produce positive community change and to sustain these efforts over time. Each chapter in this volume is also summarized here.