What do Arizonans think is going well in the state? What should change? And how? These are some of the questions the Center for the Future of Arizona has been trying to answer for the last 15 years. In order to do so, they ask the people who know the most about it: Arizonans themselves.

In 2009, the Gallup Arizona Poll asked resi­dents for a picture of what they think about the life in communities around the state and their goals for the future.

“Part of the center’s founding about 15 years ago was this understanding that in order to develop a vision of success for the state, we need to talk to Arizonans them­selves,” Civic Health Initiatives Director Kristi Tate said during a talk at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s Lunch and Learn at the Yavapai College Sedona Center on May 22. “So the center 10 years ago launched a poll in partnership with the Gallup organization to go statewide and talk to Arizonans about what are our highest hopes, aspira­tions and priorities for the state, what do we think is going to be most critical to success for the state, and that developed this vision of the Arizona we want.”

From then on, the CFA worked to create progress meters that guide its work.

“The Arizona We Want Progress Meters are an evolving, dynamic tool to measure the priorities that Arizonans identified of critical importance to the future of the state,” the CFA website reads. “The metrics were carefully considered and included with the criteria of being: Easily understood; supported by publicly available, trusted and regularly updated data; and useful as a guidepost for assessing policy and practice.”

The current meters are: Jobs, education, young talent, health and well-being, natural resources, infrastructure, civic partic­ipation and connected communities. These eight items define Arizona’s identity, according to Center leaders. However, as the website states, they may change over time as they talk to Arizona’s community members, leaders and technical experts about what matters to them.

One of the most impor­tant ways to understand what residents care about is through the Arizona We Want Community Conversations, one of which took place at the OLLI event.

During her introductory talk, Tate said the Center for the Future of Arizona focuses on “working along­side partners and commu­nities to advance solutions to the issues that are the most pressing to them,” as well as what they believe are the tools and practices that the CFA can “bring to really advance solutions to those issues and move forward as a state.”

The talk, or conversation, lasted about an hour and a half. For the first part, the CFA leaders — Tate, Civic Health Initiatives Program Coordinator Madison Rock, Progress Meters Director Ian Dowdy, Community and Economic Prosperity Director Evelyn Casuga and Educational Leadership Director Katy Cavanagh — presented the center and talked about the goals for their specific areas. Then, they listened, giving the work to the Verde Valley community members in the audience.

“What did they think makes up the identity of Arizona as state?” Tate asked. Behind her, a large image of a canyon served as background.

Nature and outdoors were one of the first aspects mentioned, followed by its cultural heritage, including the American Indian and Hispanic influences. Many talked about the friendly and welcoming aspect of the state, with Tate jumping in to add that two thirds of the Arizona population comes from other places.

A declining investment on education was also brought up by Yavapai College’s dean of lifelong learning Dennis Garvey, who said he didn’t want to be the winner in a race for the bottom where educa­tion was concerned.

“That’s what Arizonans said they care about in the 2009 Gallup poll,” Dowdy said after audi­ence members finished sharing their opinions, before going on to explain more about each of the aforementioned progress meters.

• Jobs: “Particularly jobs that provide a good living wage.”
• Education: “We recognize as Arizonans that education is often the way that people can achieve well, [earn] high-quality jobs and in a lot of ways become productive citizens.”
• Young Talent: “[It] is about making sure our young people in our state have jobs and can stay here and build a life and thrive in this community.”
• Health and well-being: “Not about only making sure everyone has access to health care but also making sure our communi­ties are great places to live and inspire and support healthy living.”
• Natural resources: “[It] is about out water resources, which is really, really important to Arizonans, but also our open space. Because the number one asset, or the number one valued item in Arizona, is our natural space and our scenic views.”
• Infrastructure: “Critical to Arizonans because they care about being able to respond to the high growth rates that we have, making sure that we have the roads, that we have the bridges, the high­ways; even in our cities, that we have our mass transit systems that work and that is something that we are working to measure as well.”
• Civic participation: “Having people engage in our community.”
• Connected commu­nities: “Getting together within their communities and about working together and talking to each other and communicating and breaking up some of these barriers that we build between each other.”

For the next portion of the event, the audience got together in groups, each focusing on one of the progress meters. The goal was for them to look at the data, state and county-wide, and discuss it. Moreover, each group needed to prepare a way to present the information for the rest of the room.

Some pointed out the importance of investing in education as a way to get better results in other meters, such as Young Talent and Civic Participation. The Health and well-being group focused on the lack of data in some counties, specifi­cally the ones that contain large portions of Indian reservations. Overall, the sentiment echoed was the same: The work starts in the personal and commu­nity levels.

One important question remained: When will the work, especially the one that involves policy, get done?

“A lot of our metrics are what we call outcomes, so they’re things that we want to achieve, which move pretty slowly, right? So what we like to do is build behind that some of the leading indicators that will help support that,” Dowdy said. “We’re working right now to listen to communi­ties and the people that have specific knowledge on these topics to figure out what those leading indica­tors might be so we can influence them and they can move more quickly and we can track progress more quickly.”

“But we do want commu­nities and stakeholders to be focused on the ultimate outcome — because that’s the goal,” he added.

You can get information on specific topics and data on arizonafuture.org.

With the exception of the education progress meters that have county-specific information, the website currently only shows state­wide data.

Natasha Heinz can be reached at 282-7795 ext. 117, or email nheinz@larsonnewspapers.com