A participatory citizen engagement analysis tool for co-producing community wellbeing indicators

Existing democratic structures are fragile and insufficient to address the cascading crises of the coming years. Without inclusive opportunities for people to communicate their views in a deliberative way, both communities and policymakers are being held back from co-creating a desirable future for Canada, a need that the Cornerstone Indicator process is aiming to address. The process combines participatory citizen engagement with data analysis to develop a set of community wellbeing indicators. The co-designed indicators combine multiple existing data points into single, intuitively understandable headline indicators. Following pilots in Sweden and Scotland, this iteration, led by core partner David Suzuki Foundation (DSF), takes place in the Milton-Parc neighbourhood in Montreal, with the objectives of (1) developing a rigorous analysis tool that can be shared in an open-source format (2) enabling the rapid and inclusive scaling of citizen-driven indicators of wellbeing.
DSF will benefit from this research as they lack the internal expertise to develop a rigorous analytic methodology for the Cornerstone process which is fundamental to developing tools that can be shared openly with other communities. This research will allow DSF to move the Cornerstone process from a pilot into a scalable tool.??

Faculty Supervisor:

Manuel Riemer

Student:

Partner:

David Suzuki Foundation (BC)

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Other services (except public administration); Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

Wilfrid Laurier University

Program: