Introduction

What is the Community Indicators Project?

The Community Indicators Project is an effort to measure the social, environmental, and economic factors that make up the quality of life in our community. The project consists of the information in this report, additional data provided at our website (www.efp.ucsb.edu), as well as the process of generating the information. Both the product and the process are essential elements of the effort. Our mission is:

To involve the Santa Barbara County community in developing and using social, environmental, and economic indicators that will guide decisions toward continually improving our quality of life.

Each section contains the measures used to describe an issue, why those measures are useful and how our community is doing with regard to those measures. The data presented throughout this document cover a wide range of topics and, when possible, separates North County from the South Coast. This is done to better delineate the differences even within a relatively small area. These data should help us discover where our resources can be placed to reduce areas of concern. It is our hope that policy makers and our citizenry will use the information here to better our lives and well-being.