This post is the latest in our vulnerable communities series, written for local government and community groups who are delivering community services and advocating for the needs of the most vulnerable among us throughout the Covid-19 Pandemic. In this update, Nenad has prepared a video tutorial demonstrating how our social atlas tool can be used to identify which parts of your community have the highest densities of people with a need for assistance due to disability – one among many measures of vulnerability.
For more detailed analysis
This do-it-yourself tutorial will help most people seeking to identify vulnerable groups. If you need a more detailed analysis of specific indicators of vulnerability, or would simply like one of our experts to conduct this analysis for you, you can contact our demographic consulting team here and learn more about the work they do to assist local government and community groups.
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In the past few months, you may have read some of the pieces we’ve published in our newsletter or blogs discussing socioeconomically vulnerable communities. Before Covid-19 spread across the world, we’d worked with many local councils on defining these communities in their local government area, addressing the characteristics of vulnerable groups for specific projects and helping make better decisions regarding community planning, preparedness and response strategies and building strong, justified cases for funding applications.
Now, in the midst of Covid-19, this is vital work to inform advocacy work and the locally-led responses to the pandemic.
Using our social atlas to identify vulnerable communities
Today, I will show you how to use one of our most popular tools, the social atlas, to build a story about a vulnerable community in your area.
The Social Atlas is part of our suite of demographic tools with over 200 councils in Australia subscribing to it (register here to see if it is available in your area). It is most closely related to the community profile (profile.id) and allows you to visualise how different themes of socioeconomic information are spatially distributed or concentrated within your council area.
While it is a map-focused tool, I’ll show you how you can also use it to view trends and changes over time, benchmark results to other areas, focus on catchments and export the data illustrated in the tool to build a strong narrative.
The social atlas provides suburb-level and neighbourhood-level information about a range of demographic groups in your municipality: from disadvantaged residents to public transport users, understanding how many people cycled to work, and visualising the distribution of residents living in housing stress.
I live in the City of Darebin LGA here in Melbourne, so I have used their social atlas as an example in the tutorial below.
Video tutorial
This quick tutorial guides you to identify and understand people with a need for assistance due to disability as part of developing an “Access and Disability Inclusion Plan”. We say that our tools can get you about “90% there” when it comes to using them to develop community plans, policies and strategies.
For deeper analysis or more information
We’re available to help you if you need to take a deeper look at demographically vulnerable groups in your community. Our consultants can help you understand the demographic characteristics of a particular group (such as people with a need for assistance due to disability), including
- an understanding of their age structure and how it differs from the overall population
- how they compare socioeconomically to the overall population
- the living arrangements and household make up of people with a disability.. and so on.
Another way you can conduct this analysis yourself is using the Communities of Interest modules in our community profiles – a very powerful way of understanding demographic characteristics for different community groups.
Or, our consultants are available to prepare a custom report for you. You can learn more about their work and get in touch with them about your project here.
Stay tuned to our blog for further updates and product enhancements about identifying vulnerable communities. Georgia Allan will be publishing a piece tomorrow about identifying low-income households who are likely to be in mortgage stress, as a result of the economic downturn caused by Covid-19.
