Scaling the Cornerstone Indicator Process
Title: Scaling the Cornerstone Indicator Process
Lead by: Kaitlyn Ashmore, MA candidate, Community Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University, Research Associate at VERiS
Supervisor: Dr. Manuel Riemer, Department of Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University, Director at VERiS
Funding: Mitacs
Approved by: Wilfrid Laurier University Research Ethics Review Board, REB#8958
Rationale and Objectives
Dark Matter Labs (DML) is a global not-for-profit designing and building options for new economic systems. Recognizing the complex, entangled reality of living systems, they are exploring alternative pathways for organizing society and stewarding the shared planetary commons. Their working hypothesis is that these pathways must be rooted in a radical reframing of our relationship to everything; from technology and money to land and the other-than-human world (Dark Matter Labs, n.d.). DML conceptualized Cornerstone Indicators as a response to the shortcomings of current indicator efforts. The aspiration behind Cornerstone Indicators was to co-create contextual indicators of systemic health capable of evaluating holistic, non-linear outcomes. The Cornerstone process (Harris, 2023) empowers communities to discuss and understand what it means to thrive and then collaboratively design indicators to track progress. Whilst the community indicators are an important element of this aspiration they are not the end goal; instead they are part of a longer journey to build the necessary everyday politics (Boyte, 2004) of the future.
The Cornerstone Indicators website and toolkit are the result of a collaborative effort between two leading organizations - Dark Matter Labs and the David Suzuki Foundation - in partnership with VERiS (created by graduate student Kaitlyn Ashmore and supported by Dr. Manuel Riemer). Together, these partners worked to create a refined methodology for analyzing community wellbeing and develop an open-source toolkit that can be used by communities locally and globally. Building on successful Cornerstone projects previously conducted in Sweden and Scotland, this project aimed to make the process of gathering, analyzing, and applying community wellbeing data more accessible and user-friendly.
The project focused on the process of analyzing qualitative data from online questionnaires and participatory workshops, creating an Excel-based thematic analysis playbook and template. This tool helps communities organize and code their data, and identify key themes. These themes are then refined into factors and dimensions, which serve as specific, measurable aspects of wellbeing. The dimensions are then matched with existing metrics from databases (such as the OECD Wellbeing Database) to ensure that local insights can be compared to relevant benchmarks.
The final deliverables - the open-source Thematic Analysis Playbook and Data Analysis Template - were designed to ensure user-friendliness for communities. It provides clear, step-by-step instructions for communities to organize data, analyze responses, and develop their own Cornerstone Indicators. This toolkit is positioned to empower diverse communities to assess their own well-being, generate localized insights, and drive future initiatives based on the data-driven indicators.
For further details and access to the open-source Thematic Analysis Playbook and Data Analysis Template, please visit the Cornerstone Indicators website.