The 2024 Vital Signs Report For Cortes Island

Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents - The Cortes Island Community Foundation just published Cortes Island’s Vital Signs report.  

“ When I started with the Community Foundation a few years ago, I  was already in the community, trying to make things happen. In particular, I tried to make things happen in the most grassroots  small nonprofit ways possible, but often in the area where I saw that there was a lot of need. Very quickly, I was in the process of writing grants and trying to figure out how to bring in those resources that I knew were out there somewhere,” explained Manda Aufochs Gillespie, Executive Director of the Cortes Foundation. 

“We're all being taxed the same as someone who lives in the city more or less, but when you look around, we don't have transit and fancy bike lanes and we don't have subsidized housing like the cities have. So I said, I know that there's money out there. There must be a way to bring some of that money here to Cortes. One of the things I realized very quickly is that we did not have data related to Cortes. Volunteers on the island would be like, ' we clearly have a housing crisis' but how do we try to express that because no one believes that rural communities at the time had a housing crisis.  By and large, the data that was available to us had us lumped in with the entire Strathcona Regional District, including Campbell River.”

“If you look at child vulnerability rates in Campbell River, they're looking at available childcare spots: What kind of resources are going into after school programming for the youngest? What kind of early literacy programs there are? What kind of food bank supports are available for families with young kids?” 

“When we tried to see how our young kids were doing, there was basically nothing.  I would be talking to Desta Beattie, at the family services on Cortes, and she would say, 'I cannot get them to give us funding for a head start program, because I cannot show them that we have any particular need.'”  

“When I started working with the Community Foundation, a few years ago, I learned about  Vital Signs and Vital Signs are usually done by community foundations with a lot more resources. Community foundations told the stories of needs and opportunities specific to their communities because  a community foundation's job is to help bring the resources that a community needs to thrive and bring the knowledge of how best to leverage those resources into the hands of the community.”

“I was like, 'we need to start with understanding what the opportunities are,  what the needs are and what an amazing thing that this Vital Signs tool exists.'  The Vital Signs tool is largely just a framework for looking at the health of the whole community.”

“It has taken us a number of years to be able to come up with enough capacity and financial wherewithal to do it. I was told recently by one of the people who helped us with this project that we are, as far as she knows, the smallest community foundation to ever do a Vital Signs of this size.”

“We specifically tied our Vital Signs into the release of the Campbell River Vital Signs. That beautiful community foundation offered to support us in a number of ways. One of the biggest ways was that they gave us a page in their print document because we are many thousands of dollars away from having the resources to do our own print document.”

“We have this page that's going to thousands of people in and around the Campbell River area, including our representatives that sit on the Board for the Regional District and other government officials who make funding decisions for us. They get to see one page about Cortes, amongst the other things, and a link to our whole report, which is on our website.”