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Santa Monica spends $1 million to assess well-being
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Santa Monica recently won a $1 million grant that it plans to use to assess the community's well-being.
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Graham Smith via Flickr Creative Commons
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Although Santa Monica may seem like an ideal place to live, with a median income of about $72,000 (according to the U.S. Census Bureau) and plenty of beach to go around, it was listed on the real estate blog Movoto as the second on its top 10 list of America’s most stressed out suburbs.
Santa Monica was recently awarded the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge grant, which is a $1 million grant the city plans to use to create a “Wellbeing Project” that will determine how much people really enjoy living there.
Julie Rusk, assistant director of community and cultural services with the city of Santa Monica, said the city will be working with the RAND Corporation and a group based out of London, the New Economics Foundation, which she said was at the forefront of such research in Europe.
“What we want to do is really use the research that’s out there about what leads to communities thriving and individuals thriving in communities and help define it, measure it and act to improve it,” Rusk said.
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Over the next couple of days, Rusk said that they will be asking questions like the following to residents: Do you feel a connection to your neighbor? How do you spend your time? Do you have access to activities?
When asked if the city’s findings have potential to be used by other cities so that they too could assess their well-being, Rusk agreed that there was potential for the findings to be used in that way.
Rusk said that they hope to have findings from the first wellbeing index in the winter. They hope to share them shortly after.
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