Your Community. Your Report.

It is the sincere wish of London Community Foundation that this report encourages even greater community involvement. We hope you will become more informed about London and Middlesex County’s economic well-being, educational prosperity, health, safety, environment, arts and culture and more. Perhaps it will spark dialogue, discussion and debate amongst people who care about community issues and want to act upon them. Ideally, it will help you identify an area where you would like to make a positive difference and get involved.

Understand the challenges we face Focus our resources Invest in the most appropriate areas

Compiling The Information

London’s Vital Signs focuses on ten key issue areas. For each of the issue areas, we have collected information and reported on the key contributing factors for that issue. One indicator was agreed upon by all participating Community Foundations. The remaining indicators were deemed important by local experts. It is important to note this report is based on secondary data, that is, data that already exists. This includes recent Canadian Census data, as well as the results of local researchers and organizations.

Consequently, Vital Signs should not be viewed as a formal academic research report. The reader should consider it to be a snapshot of how well we are doing at this point in time using common and accessible measurement data.

London Community Foundation held a series of community consultations with experts from across all issue areas. We asked these experts to tell us what they believe is important information to share with the community. Over 70 individuals gave of their time and talent to help us compile the indicators.

Making The Grade

Nearly 200 Londoners gave their views on how well we are doing in London and Middlesex in each of the ten issue areas we have measured. These grades are reflective of the perceptions of those surveyed, not of the actual data itself. This process provided graders the opportunity to consider where we are doing very well, and what needs attention.

The grades in this report reflect the collective sentiment of all individuals who participated in this survey.  The five-point scale the graders used was:

   A: Awesome! We’re the tops!
   B: We’re doing well and headed in the right direction.
   C: Progress is being made.
   D: Of concern, needs attention.
   F: In dire need of corrective action.

They were also asked to identify one or two priorities where they felt the community should focus its attention.