All in the Community

Yvette Rodriguez Stern and Sarah Yuan (both COF) led the project team for the Center’s recently published 2018 Community Profile Series, created in collaboration with the YMCA of Honolulu. The profile series presents measures of quality of life and well-being for 11 communities surrounding the YMCA branches on O‘ahu. The team, which also included COF members Javzandulam Azuma and Kathleen Gauci, looked at 38 objective measures of community well-being from a variety of national and state data sources. Then they conducted analyses to assess and rank the 11 communities on five domains of well-being: family and social environment, economic well-being, education, health, and community, and they compared each community to the county and the state. While the profile series was developed to assist the YMCA in its strategic planning and program-development efforts, the individual profiles can be used as tools to assist anyone interested in using data to inform efforts that improve the well-being of these communities and their residents.