The Health of a Community | Chamber Made | The Job of Finding Work | Interview with Josh Barney

The Health of a Community

What the Healthier Barrington Needs Survey Has Taught Us

By Lisa Stamos | Photography by April Graves

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The Healthier Barrington Needs Survey has measured various aspects of our lives for the past 15 years, offering insight about what we value and what we see as the challenges. There is much to be learned from this study, but the real story that’s told is one of a community that listens to its needs and works together to improve its quality of life.

Healthier Barrington Coalition partners Karen Lambert, President of Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital; Leslie Luther-Jeschke, Executive Director of Barrington Area United Way; and Karen Darch, President of the Village of Barrington.

Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital started the survey as a means to reach out to the greater Barrington area community, and to become better connected and more aware of the needs of the community. In their commitment, they hired Sylvia (Syl) Boeder for the role of community relations. She has been instrumental in all aspects of conducting the survey, reporting results, and building a coalition of community service organizations that can respond to the data. Syl is joined by Karen Darch and the researcher, Joel Cowen, as those of a handful of people who were there from the start.

The Healthier Barrington Project’s first survey was conducted, and has since been, through a partnership with the Health Systems Research at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. The survey is the main method for collecting input and data for the Healthier Barrington Project. Every three years, starting in 1996, the survey has reached between 3-4,000 residents through a random selection, with what is considered a successful outcome at a 13.1 percent response rate for the 2011 survey. For the 2011 survey, that represents 524 surveys returned. According to Joel Cowen, the researcher who has led the survey’s development, that is a response adequate for the task.

“We wanted 400 survey responses, which assumes a margin of error of +5/-5 percent. Statistically, this is a successful outcome. After a thousand responses, you really don’t gain anything — you’re at the point where you’ve got the right answers,” he said.

Joel also noted that he maps the Healthier Barrington data against U.S. Census data to see if there are any biases. “For Barrington, the bias does lean to older people, women, and a better-educated individual,” he noted. He added that women tend to respond more often to inquiries that involve human services.

The information from the survey was made available to the public through the Village of Barrington’s presentation at a public meeting in the fall. The survey is also currently available through the Barrington Area Library’s Web site, at www.barringtonarealibrary.org/community-resources.html.

The information collected is directed at a broad spectrum that represents an overall understanding of the quality of life in the area. The main focus is the community’s sense of what it needs, what it wants, as well as questions that look into both positive and negative aspects of life here. The main theme that rises to the top – the primary factors that matter most – are the quality of our schools, living in a peaceful, small town atmosphere, and low levels of crime. Services related to the school district and local library were rated highest.

Employment issues — a key theme

According to the 2011 survey, 13.9 percent of households experienced involuntary job loss during the past year, up from 10.5 percent in 2008. Today, job losses are the most common within households of respondents aged 45-65. Unemployed respondents indicated that they did not find the assistance that they needed to help them locate a job – at a rate of over 44 percent of people responding who are unemployed.

While the unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent nationally, Barrington area residents who responded to the survey report that 19.5% of households had someone unemployed and looking for work in the past year.

While we were reading this information, on the other end of the unemployment conversation, we learned that at CareerPlace, a Barrington-based job coaching and support agency, the services are currently under-utilized by the public. We’ve featured them in this issue to help let people know about their services, including three current job seekers who shared their stories.

A large shift in employment is that more people are working from home. In 2011, the percentage was noted at 27.9 percent — almost double what it was in 1999, when it was measured at 13.4%. The Barrington Area Chamber of Commerce is well-aware of this statistic, and is developing its programs to help support this sector. Extra meeting space, news ways to connect and network, and services that are geared for the small business are a priority, as reported in our feature story on the Chamber.

Basic needs in a recession

Another key finding in the 2011 Healthier Barrington Needs Survey is that people are putting off health care services because of cost, or had difficulty in paying their bills – both categories noted at about 20 percent of households. More than half of all respondents (56.9 percent) noted that they had been affected financially by the recession through pay cuts and investment losses. People are spending their dollars more carefully.

Concern for our children

One of the ways in which the Healthier Barrington coalition works together is adding new questions, or updating the manner in which questions are asked. Coalition members share information and network together to continually improve the data collections, especially based on the trends that they see. For example, a new question was added that asked, “Which of the following are issues for your child or children under 18?”

Three problems led the list — over-scheduling (10 percent), anxiety and nervousness (9.4 percent), and attention deficit disorder (9.1 percent). The next concerns listed were sleep deprivation (7.5 percent), bullying (6 percent) and learning disabilities (5.7 percent). Of all respondents, nearly 70 percent of parents noted one of the above concerns.

Putting the information to work

Village of Barrington president, Karen Darch, has found the surveys to be very useful through the years. “It allows us to make informed decisions,” she said. Yet the greatest benefit is in how the coalition partners come together. “The group is cohesive, and comfortable with each other” she said. “They are cooperative, knowledgeable and able to implement the findings that are important — and with results.”

There is an enormous amount of information in the 2011 Healthier
Barrington Needs Survey to wade through and put to work. Coalition members are looking to take the relationships they’ve built and create a system that makes it easier for residents to find the help they need in social services and the many areas that together make up a better quality of life.

It’s impressive that the Healthier Barrington project is still going — and that its members are even looking to move their collective efforts to a more efficient level for the public. Researcher Joel Cowen says that this survey is the longest-running of its kind in our area. But he is quick to add a personal perspective.

“The heart of this story is not just the longitudinal aspect of the effort and the data – it’s the collaboration, and the people working together to carry it forward, getting results. It’s what differentiates Barrington.”

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The Healthier Barrington Project Coalition

The coalition members of the Healthier Barrington Project have learned that citizens may require between five to eight (or even more) contacts by phone to agencies and service providers before they find one that is a fit. There is so much to wade through. There are layers of qualifying and general discussion to see if a particular organization is the right one, and one whose services can be afforded, and qualified for in terms of where that person lives, and other criteria. This insight might be the most important information of all. It could be the next evolution for the coalition.

Coalition members meet on a regular basis to discuss survey findings. A topic at a meeting in November was the discussion of a possible initiative to address and raise questions that revolve around how to offer a path to simplify the process for people who are reaching out for assistance. Also, there is room for greater alignment and understanding between coalition members in terms of referring people to the right agency for their needs, hopefully within the first referral.

As the discussion continues into 2012, Julie Mayer, from Advocate Good Shepherd
Hospital, and founding coalition member, Joyce Palmquist of the Barrington Area Council on Aging, spearhead the discussions.

Taking notes is Kylie Mena, a Barrington High School student with an eye toward med school in the years ahead. Kylie is working as an intern for the coalition, contacting agencies in the surrounding communities, and gathering and organizing data that may become the basis for an informational “navigation” system of some kind, made available to the general public once created. It’s a work in progress.