Course Description
The key to any successful project is knowing what you want to do and how you want to do it: goals and objectives. Less obvious, perhaps, is knowing whether you have actually achieved your goals. How do you know if you accomplished what you set out to do?

The Center for Economic and Environmental Development at Allegheny College is a young organization. It was formally initiated in July of 1997. In that short time, however, it has expanded rapidly. CEED's mission is to increase community and regional leaders' understanding of how economic and environmental decisions can work hand in hand to bring a new vitality to Northwest Pennsylvania. CEED's goals are to promote the practice of environmental education for all ages and abilities, environmental stewardship, and economic revitalization based on environmentally sound business practices. The future challenge to CEED is to shift community inertia from one of despair over lost opportunities toward a forward thinking vision of a region that can be at once economically inspiring and environmentally sustainable. CEED's long range goals and objectives, therefore, are to expand its efforts along nine important fronts: watershed protection, educational outreach, sustainable industry, sustainable visioning, sustainable agriculture and landscape ecology, sustainable energy, sustainable forestry, and environmental justice.

CEED's goals and objectives are lofty. Its Projects are ably advised by faculty and operated by students in cooperation with community stakeholders. But the question of assessment still remains. How do Project directors really know if they have achieved what they set out to do? This is not just an idle question of speculation, but answering the question of assessment is also worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Funders of all stripes like to know that their investments in CEED have paid rich dividends. CEED needs to be able to provide documentation of that success, if it hopes to get fresh funding.
Your job in this seminar is to work as a consulting group to CEED. Each of you will be in charge of gathering data on a Project (two of you will be assigned to Creek Connections, the largest CEED project). The projects and the guidelines for data collection are outlined below.
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Criteria for Good Indicators
(generated by students)

1. Easy to understand.
2. Concise Presentation.
3. Reliable information.
4. Relevant information.
5. Appropriate level of information for those not familiar with the project.
6. Quantifiable.
7. Attractiveness.
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You will need to prepare reports with the following information.
A. Project Scope

1. Project Mission
2. Project Goals
3. Project Initiation Date
4. Project Partners
B. Project Progress to Date

1. Direct Quantitative Impact
a. Direct on Allegheny College students
b. Direct on Community members
2. Indirect Quantitative Impact
a. Indirect on Allegheny College students
b. Indirect on Community members
3. Qualitative Impact
a. Qualitative impact on Allegheny College students
b. Qualitative impact on Community members
c. Indicators for Future Progress

You will need to make suggestions and recommendations for Project Directors to select what benchmarks to use to determine if Projects are achieving their missions and goals? Also, prepare an indicators worksheet to be used in future years.
D. Project Goals

1. What new goals should each project set (you will make recommendations based on interviews with project leaders, project participants, and reviews of comparable projects around the country)

2. Re-set new goals after consultation with project directors.

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Schedule
All reports to be prepared as both written and graphical (or PowerPoint) format. You will also present your data for feedback and critique to the rest of the group. Deadlines will be adjusted as the semester proceeds.

Part A completed by February 3, 2000
Part B, first draft completed by March 8
Part B, second draft, and Part C completed by March 17
Part D competed by April
Comp Question chosen by February 16, 2000
Two comp reviews by February 23
Comp Proposal, First Draft of Introduction and Methods completed by March 13, 2000. This includes:

* Introduction and literature review of at least 15 references
* Methods
* Timetable
* Expected results
* Review of two earlier comps

Comp proposal, Second Draft completed by April 26.
Presentation of Comps from March 29 – April 26.
Due Dates subject to change, pending progress reports on Indicators.
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Grades will be based on class participation, i.e., the quality and intensity of your critique of other's presentations (20%), Parts A-D (15% each), Comp first draft, Comp second draft (10% each).
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Useful Links

Redefining Progress has a page with links to other Community Indicator Projects.
State Environmental Goals and Indicators Project has a full list of categories to choose from for comparison to other indicators. SEGIP has another page with regional and international indicators that might be useful.

EPA's Environmental Indicator Website is self-explanatory.
"Center for excellence of Sustainable Development" Online. World Wide Web25 Jan. 2000. Available http://www.sustainable.doe.gov/measuring/melocal.htm -This site is pretty good it has the general titles of indicators that other cities and groups are using to assess their own sustainable development program. Some high profile examples are Washington DC or Seattle, Washington and Jacksonville, Florida, all of the major cities have links to their cities sustainable development websites which are interesting.
Sustainable Seattle has some sample indicators that are thought provoking.

Hart, Maureen. "Hart Environmental Data" Online. World Wide web. This is a good place to start. This is a great site; it is very thorough about environmental indicators, why they are important. This site has very current information. It has an indictor development checklist and data base. This site has a downloadable program that teaches you how to present your indicators in daylong presentation it talks about who to present to when to stop and talk about certain aspects as so forth. It also has excerpts from Mrs. Hart's book; called "Guide to Sustainable Community Indicators" the 2nd edition just released in 1999.

These are two sites of sustainable community success stories the first one has hundreds of links and the second is the Ecovillage in Ithaca, NY.
http://www.sustainable.doe.gov/overview/ovsstoc.htm#megalink
http://www.ecovillage.ithaca.ny.us/

Here is the EPA's watershed indicators page. It relies heavily on biological indicators.
Here is the EPA's Indicators page. This website is by the EPA, so I would assume that the information is fairly valid. This website is great for picking out key terms that have to do with indicators and defining them, This is one of the first opinions that they offer, which I think is good because them you have the vocabulary to understand the rest of the website. The website also offers information on the current initiatives for state. They also offer current projects that are being run. The website appears to be up-to-date and they mention future information that will be offered. Colleen Toledahno

Indicators from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has an interesting global page on Development Indicators from a global perspective.

The Eldis Guide to Statistics is a very promising site of links to other sites that seem promising as resources on indicators and benchmarks for sustainability. Eldis is funded by the Danish development agency Danida, and hosted by the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex.
The Canada Office of Energy Efficiency may have some useful materials.

This community of Hennepin, MN has developed their own set of community indicators for sustainability. They have a report that you can download that explains how they chose their indicators and the current state of their community.

There is a handbook published by the World Bank organization. It deals primarily with sustainability on a nationwide level, but has some good stuff on how to choose appropriate indicators.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)has a very good page on how to choose appropriate indicators and another page just dedicated to Green Campus (IISD) initiatives.

Here's an excellent page prepared by the Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development, a page owned and operated by the U.S. Department of Energy. A lot of good stuff on indicators. Keep in mind that most of what DOE does is manage the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Problems and fundamentals of sustainable development indicators.

In press : Sustainable Development (Vol. 3, 3 or Vol. 4,1). A real academic citation. This is a great link for those who question the methodology of indicators. Written by Dr.Gordon Mitchell of The University of Leeds, Leeds, W. Yorkshire, UK, this document address some of the problems that plague the statistical and methodological characteristics of indicators. This critique offers both insight as to the problematic nature of indicators as well as useful information about the effectiveness of carefully designed indicator . note: the paper is lengthy but worth the read.

Urban Quality Indicators newsletter. This newsletter is a phenomenal resource with articles on sustainable community indicators and an excellent set of links to other communities.


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Eric Pallant, Department of Environmental Science, Allegheny College/updated 27 March 2000