Did you know youth unemployment in Ottawa rose to 15 per cent last year, the highest in a decade and the highest among Canada’s six largest cities?
Are you aware that mental health emergency visits to the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario have increased by 75 per cent since 2010? Or that 40 per cent of all visible minority children in the city live in low-income households?
That’s the sort of information you’ll find at the community foundation of Ottawa’s new web-based community knowledge centre, launching Monday. Called Ottawa Insights, the web portal ultimately will present comprehensive information and data in eight theme areas.
Only four of the themes will be active initially — general demographics, economy and employment, health and wellness, and basic needs and standard of living.
The remaining four — arts and culture, environment and sustainability, community and belonging, and education and learning — will be phased in over the summer and fall.
Ottawa Insights follows an earlier community foundation initiative, the annual Vital Signs report, which measured and assigned letter grades to 11 quality-of-life indicators in the city between 2007 and 2010.
The foundation says Ottawa Insights will leverage the foundation’s past experience with Vital Signs to deliver “an enriched and adaptable vehicle for knowledge, engagement and collaboration.”
The community foundation, which has distributed nearly $100 million in grants to the community since its inception and currently manages assets worth about $120 million, says the new web portal will make it easier for it and its donors to make evidence-based decisions.
More broadly, it says, its goal is to support shared understanding and strategic collaboration by donors, funders, policy-makers, delivery agencies and citizens working to create a caring and equitable city.
Each of the Ottawa Insights theme pages lists key issues relevant to that theme. Each of those issues, in turn, has its own page, providing up to five easy-to-understand graphics illustrating how the city is doing.
Drop-down menus provide more detail on the data behind the graphics, along with links to Ottawa organizations working on the issue.
The four initial themes contain data on 18 key issues, including such things as population breakdowns by age and household income, the birthplaces of immigrants, knowledge of official languages and the proportion of residents who rely on food banks or emergency housing shelters.
Data will also be available on the gap between the richest and poorest in Ottawa, the adequacy of social assistance, transit ridership and costs, municipal income and spending, hospital performance, smoking rates, physical activity and the prevalence of overweight or obese residents.
A core element of Ottawa Insights will be a piece provisionally called “what we are seeing,” based on discussions with front line staff, not-for-profit leaders, program beneficiaries, business leaders, funders and others.
The purpose is to “enable deeper layers of understanding to emerge, beyond the statistics and trends,” and suggest possible ways of addressing emerging problems.
The community foundation will formally launch the new online knowledge centre Monday afternoon at the University of Ottawa.
