Measuring Well-Being
in Canada

a

Discussion Kit

What do we value as a society?

How can we tell if things are
getting better or worse?

The discussion outlined here provides an opportunity for you and others to help identify goals that are appropriate for Canada in the 21st Century.

By identifying what we value and then finding ways to measure whether related circumstances are getting better or worse, we will be able to steer our way more effectively into the future.

We wish you luck and inspiration for organizing a meeting on this topic. Thank you for your interest and for any effort you make to get notes from your meeting back to us. We look forward to including your insights in the process of establishing new measures of well-being for Canada.

Introduction:

Goals are the seeds from which our future grows.

When we value something, we want to have it in our lives. Much of what we value we can provide either by ourselves or with the help of our families. Other things, like health care and communications systems require cooperation on a community or global level. Nutritious food, pure water and fresh air require whole ecosystems to maintain.

People have long pooled resources to accomplish goals that are beyond their individual means. To meet the challenges of the new Millennium, we need a clear idea of what we want to accomplish with our pooled resources and we need ways to tell if our collective efforts are bringing us closer to those goals.

The Canada Well-Being Measurement Act aims to determine what we value as a society and to develop a set of indicators that can monitor our progress or loss of ground in those areas.

What Do We Value?


The Canada Well-Being Measurement Act designates a Standing Committee of the House of Commons to:

". . . prepare recommendations with respect to: the broad societal values on which the set of indicators should be based;" and to do this: "receive input from the public through submissions and public hearings."

If the Act becomes law, the comments from your discussion will be among the materials used to determine the values and indicators for the new measuring system. Until then, they will be used to encourage the creation of such indicators and serve as evidence of what it is that people in Canada want from their taxes and the legitimacy that we lend to our governments.

This kit aims to provide enough detail to prepare someone who has never organized a meeting before to work with a room full of strangers. If parts seem too obvious or unnecessary, just move onto the parts that will help you focus on the topic. Everything suggested here is optional.

It's your meeting.

Improving this Kit:


Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or comments. If anything is unclear, we'd like to know. Together we can make it easier for others to engage in this discussion.

Discussion Guide

Contents:

Introduction:
Purpose of Discussion:
Preparing for a Meeting:
What You Will Need:
Timing:
Arrivals:
The Discussion:
Welcome and Introductions:
Introducing the Topic:
Brainstorming on Values:
Removing Duplications, Discussion and Priorities:
Open Space; List Making Made Easy:
Measuring What We Value:
Other Values to Consider:
Providing Feedback:
Other Projects:

Purpose of Discussion:

Preparing for a Meeting:


The first steps are to decide where and when the event will be held, who will be invited and how they will be notified.

If the people you are thinking of are accustomed to meeting at a particular place and time, all you have to do is get this discussion on the agenda.

Read through this guide and think about how you would adapt it for use by the people you have in mind. Gather the necessary equipment and resources; prepare any handouts; and order additional copies of the Measuring Well-Being booklet. The booklet will help clarify the topic for your participants and lead to a more interesting discussion.

Ask for free copies of Measuring Well-Being.
Write postage free to:
Joe Jordan MP, House of Commons, Ottawa, K1A 0A6

Tel. 1 (800) 437-4369 Email jordaj@parl.gc.ca

or contact the 7th Generation Initiative. Most of the material in the booklet is available on this site.

If you are expecting more than eight or ten people, or if your participants are not familiar with each other, you may want to make additional copies of the feedback pages.

For a really enjoyable event, refreshments are always appreciated.

The leader(s) of the discussion should prepare in advance and be familiar with the information contained in this booklet and Measuring Well-Being. You don't have to be an 'expert' but it helps if you know the basics about the Canada Well-Being Measurement Act and the 7th Generation Initiative.

What You Will Need:

Timing


It is easy to get so involved talking about values that an entire evening can disappear without getting to other aspects of the discussion. To avoid this it helps to know how long the meeting will be and how much of that time will be spent on which activities.

This discussion can easily take four hours. The time can be divided into two two-hour sessions - either morning and afternoon, or two separate evenings. However, if you only have one evening or afternoon for the discussion, it can be done in two and a half hours.

The times at each step are suggestions for how long each section might take if you plan to run your event for 4 hrs. or for 2 1/2 hrs.

Arrivals:


Have someone welcome each participant as they arrive. If people are not already familiar with each other, provide name tags (and marking pens) and invite them to print their name clearly in large letters.

Provide the "Contact Information" sheet so that people can print their names, addresses, telephone and email. This contact information is separate from the information asked for on the profile questionnaires; it is invaluable for following-up with next steps as the campaign to establish better measures of well-being continues.

The Discussion:

Topic:

What do we value as a society?

Step 1 - Welcome and Introductions:

30 min. 10min.

Welcome everyone to the workshop. Introduce yourself and anyone else who will be sharing the leadership of the gathering.

Before proceeding, if participants are not already familiar with each other, general introductions are in order. Each person can introduce himself or herself to the entire group, or introductions can double as a warm up exercise.

Giving everyone an opportunity to speak about themselves serves a number of purposes:

Warming up through introductions:

Ask participants to form pairs, preferably with people they don't already know. The group leader can be a part of a pair or not as needed. When everyone has found a partner, ask them to introduce themselves to each other. Before they start, explain that after the one to one introductions, person A will introduce person B to the whole group and B will introduce A. Tell them that they will have five minutes each. After the first 5 minutes, indicate that it is time to switch. After the second 5 minutes, bring the focus back to the whole group and have each person introduce the individual they were talking with.

Step 2 - Introducing the Topic:

5 min. 5 min.

Share the introduction and the purpose of the workshop.

Reading the first paragraph in Step 3 will identify the topic, and if your people are not familiar with brainstorming, the rest of that section will launch you into the process.

Step 3 - Brainstorming on Values:

50 min. 30 min.

The topic is values - social values - things or circumstances which we value but which require more than one person or family to maintain. The objective of the brainstorming is to make a list of things that the people in your group value and which participants feel should be cultivated or safe guarded.

Brainstorming is easy.

Someone should be delegated to record ideas on large sheets of paper or a black board.

While making the initial list just think of anything that relates to the topic and say it. No comments on statements made, no contradictions, no negative statements of any kind allowed; just ideas, no matter how ridiculous or profound. Piggybacking - ideas inspired by earlier ideas - are welcome. The more variety the better and the more fun it will be. Let the ideas flow uninterrupted and write them all down. After all has been said or the allotted time is over, move onto Step 4.

Step 4 - Removing Duplication, Discussion and Priorities:

55 min. 40 min.

To eliminate duplication, identify similar or duplicate ideas on the writen list with a star, circle, square, or other symbol. Express similar or duplicate ideas with one word or phrase and mark off those they replace. It will take some discussion to clarify which items represent the same values and which are separate.

To assist in setting priorities, have each person identify their five or ten choices for the most important values. (Each person should have an equal number of 'votes' but the more values you have to prioritize, the larger that number should be.) People can either tell the scribe to put marks next to their favourite items, or everyone can go to the list, ponder the options and make their own marks.

When everyone's preferences are marked, the values can be arranged in order by counting the number of marks each has received. The order of priority then runs from the most popular to the least. Additional discussion may be needed to resolve ties and it may be necessary to do a second round of 'voting' to order the bottom part of the list if a number of values remain which got no votes the first time around.

This list of values in priority order will provide subjects for discussing how to measure improvements or deterioration in our quality of life.

Open Space; List Making Made Easy:

This technique can replace Steps 3 and 4.
105 min. 60 min.

This process can replace Steps 3 & 4.

The larger a group is the more complex the process of listing and prioritizing values becomes. Open Space is a process which can make it easier for any size group.

All you need is an open wall, paper, writing tools and masking tape.

Give each participant five or six pieces of paper and something with which they can write bold clear letters. Have some extra sheets of paper available in case they are needed.

Participants write down their values, each on a separate piece of paper and tape them to the wall where they can all be viewed.

To deal with duplication, have participants scan the wall for similar items and re-group them according to topic. The values that are of the greatest importance to the group will start becoming evident as the clustering proceeds.

To further prioritize the list, the same process described in Step 4 can be followed with each participant distributing a number of marks to indicate the values which they feel are the most important.

When priorities have been assigned, clusters will have to be given representative names. As with the previous method, this prioritized list is what we are collecting along with ideas about how they might be measured to help determine the goals we want to pursue as a society.

Step 5 - Measuring What We Value:

85 min. 60 min.

With the values identified and prioritized, the next step is to think about and discuss how we might monitor them. Ask the following questions about the values on your list and write down the ideas that come up.

How might we tell if the circumstances
associated with each value are getting better or worse?

What sorts of changes would indicate improvement or
deterioration in the things valued?

Some examples: Water quality can be monitored by testing for pollutants; Employment satisfaction by how many people would rather have more or less or other sorts of work; A measure of energy security could be the amount of renewable energy being used as compared to our use of diminishing reserves of fossil fuels; Food security, as a factor of the amount of agricultural land and its relative fertility divided by the size of the population. Statistics Canada was looking for an indicator for time stress, and asked, among other things, "Do you feel rushed on a daily basis?"

Be imaginative, any ideas that come to mind for measuring circumstances related to the identified values will help.

Other Values to Consider:

If time remains.

In the unlikely event that you have had enough time to discuss all the items from your list and have identified how they might be monitored, take a look at the following list. If there are any here that you have not already discussed, see what ideas you can come up with for monitoring them.
Forests, fish, soil fertility and other natural resource stocks, pollution levels including air and water quality, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, employment and employment satisfaction, opportunities for young people, the quality of education and health care, population stability, life expectancy, opportunities to participate in and the effectiveness of decision making processes, community cohesion, voluntary and unpaid work, stress, leisure time, income distribution, durability of goods, and the costs of crime.

Every person and every group is unique. You may well come up with things to think about that no one has ever thought of before. In any case, the process of sharing thoughts about what we value and how to measure our progress toward those values will expand the understanding of everyone involved.

[The forms refered to here are available for the asking. I have yet to figure out how to post them on the net.]

Providing Feedback:


Profile of your group: 15 min. 5 min.

Before your participants leave, please have them fill in the "Group Profile" form. If your people are already friends, they may be content to enter their information onto the same sheet. If the group is not so familiar, provide individual copies for each person.

People with different backgrounds experience life differently. Women see the world differently than men. People from North America see things differently from South Americans, Europeans, Africans or Asians, people in their sixties differently from those in their twenties. Because there are many sorts of people in Canada, feedback is needed from people of all backgrounds so that the values identified by this process represent the full spectrum of views.

The group profile information is anonymous. Please do not put your name or address on the profile form. The only use the profile information will be put to is to identify what part of our varied population your ideas come from.
Contact Information:

The "Contact Information" sheet will not accompany the group profile into the indicator identification process. If you want to be kept informed about next steps, please do include your contact information on the contact information sheet. Our interest is in the next stages of the campaign. It will take a cooperative effort to get the Canada Well-Being Measurement Act passed.

Building a network is important. As one correspondent pointed out, measurements of progress can be manipulated. In her province, there is a measure of progress in education which ignores popular requests to include in its calculations the number of students each teacher is required to teach. As a result, the measure speaks well of the delivery of resources to classrooms compared to administration, but fails to indicate that the amount of time each students gets from teachers is shrinking.

We want to know how to reach you so that, if necessary, we can sound our voices together to make sure the progress being measured is toward the sort of goals that are identified through public discussions.

After the Meeting:
Feedback:

Your ideas are important and will become a part of the information by which the expanded system for measuring well-being is created. Your reply sheets will help identify what people in this country value and want to preserve. They will provide suggestions for how we might measure progress towards these goals. And they will help persuade policy makers that we need and want improved measures of well-being in Canada. With sufficient public awareness and participation, we can move popular concerns onto the public agenda.

Please fill in the sheet provided. Make more copies or use additional paper if you have more to share than will fit on the single page.

Other Projects:


There is a great deal of interest in measuring well-being. If your group is stimulated by this discussion, they may want to take additional steps. There are two activities to consider. One is to chart the "Ecological Footprint" of your community and the other is to set up and work with a system of well-being indicators specific to your community.

Measuring your Ecological Footprint:

This is a step by step process by which you can determine what area of the Earth's surface is needed to support your community. How much land area is require to provide your food, clothing, housing, transportation, utensils, power and recreation. By assessing these factors, a great deal can be learned about our impacts on the planet and where we can adjust our lifestyles to secure long-term well-being.

Community Indicator Project:

The work you do with this discussion kit will help identify indicators for charting progress on a national scale. The same sort of work can produce a set of indicators particular to your city, town or community. By involving residents in identifying what they think is important, finding ways of tracking those values locally and publicizing changes in the resulting indicators, members of a community can become directly involved in improving the local quality of life.

7th Generation Initiative

P.O. Box 374, Merrickville, Ontario
K0G 1N0

http://www.SustainWellBeing.net

Phone: 1 (613) 269-3500 toll free: 1 (877) 455-9552
e-mail sustain@web.ca


A print copy of this kit is available on request.

Seven Generations


There is a tradition in some societies, whenever decisions are being made, to consider the interests of the next seven generations.

For the modern world to do the same would mark our passage to maturity.

Seven generations is a yard stick of human experience. You may have known your Great Grandparents, likely your Grandparents, your Parents, your Self, your Children, Grandchildren and possibly your Great Grandchildren. Seven generations can be grasped subjectively, yet seven generations from now, we will be unknown. The purpose of making decisions with this time frame in mind is to assure that we