For community initiatives, community-level indicators can be seen as one ultimate outcome of any initiative. While a monitoring system, constituent surveys, goal attainment reports, and interviews can help pinpoint the success of individual events, community-level indicators try to determine how individual events affect the community as a whole. Indicators are measures of the status of a community and the environment it creates that affect well-being at a particular time or over a period of time. A community level indicator can be collected and reported for communities such as neighborhoods, towns or cities, or regions. Community-level indicators may come from sources such as archival, surveillance, data developed for other purposes or from surveys implemented specifically for tracking local indicators. For more information you may want to visit Chapter 38, Section 9: Gathering and Using Community-Level Indicators [http://ctb.ku.edu/tools/en/section_1371.htm] on the Community Tool Box.
