Dear Friends,

I’m pleased to present you with the 5th edition of The State of the Community, United Way’s regional indicators report. Published biennially, the report provides data showing how our regional community is doing in the areas of Education, Income, Health, Population, and Social Relations. The State of the Community’s ongoing research is conducted by the Community Research Collaborative, a partnership of United Way of Greater Cincinnati and the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Cincinnati.

The State of the Community follows 45 high quality indicators that, taken together, provide a good view of our region’s overall socioeconomic health and how it is changing over time. This printed version of the report provides you with data for 29 of those 45 indicators and also makes a compelling case for a new, yet-to-bedeveloped health indicator of Child Maltreatment. In this edition, most indicators are aligned with the Bold Goals for Our Region in the areas of Education, Income and Health. In addition, there are indicators in the areas of Population and Social Relations.

The printed editions of The State of the Community have proven to be a powerful and often quoted resource for community leaders and engaged citizens. However, they share with all printed indicators studies a key limitation: the data included are current at the time of publication but new data for the selected indicators become available regularly thereafter. For that reason, United Way and several partner organizations have worked hard to develop a new regional data portal with a powerful, searchable database that keeps The State of the Community indicators up-to-date. The portal also provides other data sets from reliable sources that cast light on the social and economic health of our region and its counties. Facts Matter is the name of this regional data portal and you can access it at www.factsmatter.info. We hope you will visit the Facts Matter data portal often and make full use of the data it contains and its many helpful features.

Creating a regional community that is among the best places in the nation for people to live and work is an ongoing task that can succeed only if many individuals and organizations come together to:
• Envision a high quality of life for all our people,
• Select community-level goals that are both inspirational and achievable, and
• Work to create the system changes required to achieve the goals.

That so many individuals and organizations have coalesced around the Bold Goals for Our Region is a testament to the strong spirit of human caring that is a hallmark of our local culture. As of November, 2012, over 225 area non-profit organizations, governmental units and businesses had endorsed the Goals and pledged to take steps to help achieve them.

Increasingly, our regional community is recognized nationally as a place in which key institutions work together for social transformation. National journals have identified our region as being among those most dedicated to “collective impact” and point to initiatives like Agenda 360, LISC of Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, place matters, Partners for a Competitive Workforce, The Strive Partnership, Success By 6®, and Vision 2015. These efforts, along with our community’s selection for four highly competitive Social Innovation Fund grants, point to a region in which individuals and organizations are coming together to address the root causes of its most persistent problems. United Way is proud to be closely associated with all these efforts and is pleased that this report and the Facts Matter data portal provide a way to track our community’s progress in the Bold Goals areas.

For more than eight years, the volunteers on United Way’s Research Council have given generously of their time and insights to make sure that the data to be found in The State of the Community report and at the Facts Matter data portal are relevant and accurate and reflect the changing realities of our region. The names and organizational affiliations of those volunteers appear at the end of this report and we are very grateful to all of them. We are especially indebted to Dr. Eric Rademacher, Dr. Kim Downing and Ms. Toby Sallee of the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Cincinnati who make up the staff of the Community Research Collaborative (CRC). It is they who collect, analyze and frame the data that go into this report and the Facts Matter data portal.

There are many partner organizations that support United Way in producing The State of the Community report and maintaining the Facts Matter data portal. Some provide funding and some provide crucial data. For their unstinting support, United Way thanks Agenda 360, BRIDGES for a Just Community, the Center for Economic Analysis and Development at Northern Kentucky University, The Greater Cincinnati Foundation, The Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile, Jr./U.S. Bank Foundation, The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, The Strive Partnership, and Vision 2015.

We invite you to join United Way and its community partners in working to achieve our community’s Bold Goals and to make full use of The State of the Community report and Facts Matter website in that work. Together, we can build a diverse and respectful community in which all our people enjoy the blessings of a strong education, adequate income and good health.