Albany Community Foundation’s first-of-its-kind Vital Signs report reveals state of Albany’s quality of life

Albany Community Foundation hopes its first-of-its-kind Vital Signs report will pave the way for Albany to directly address its social issues. The 12-page report launched on Wednesday combines local knowledge and data, drawn from more than 20 stakeholder workshops over the last 12 months, and publicly available statistics, such as the census, and government and industry reports. Project co-ordinator Katie Arbuckle worked with ACF board member James Leiper to drive the project. Mr Leiper said the project began broadly and involved a lot of people but evolved to focus on four themes most relevant to Albany and the Great Southern — education and employment, housing and financial stress, belonging, and health and resilience. They formed targeted smaller groups looking at each of the areas and held plenty more one-off meetings with some of the workshops running to two or three hours long, allowing them to go into “deeper dives”, according to Ms Arbuckle. “It was almost a matrix of meetings that were all connected,” she said. The pair said while some of the information was unsurprising, there was a lot of data they did not expect. “It challenged my assumptions almost every day, there were not many days that went by that I didn’t learn something,” Ms Arbuckle said. “When I moved here three years ago from Canada, I saw this place as very prosperous because I was in my little bubble, but then when I dug deeper I found some of those social problems that are here.” Ms Arbuckle and Mr Leiper said they were excited to release the report and see how it would be used. This first report will act as a baseline for further reports in coming years, which Mr Leiper expected would likely time with the release of national census data. “A lot of community foundations have this as a starting point and then they develop a new plan which is a bit of a ‘what now?’,” he said. “We don’t want this just on a shelf gathering dust — we want people to use it, we want service providers to use it to apply for grants, we want the community to know what is happening and we want to be able to measure how we are improving or declining.” The full report can be found on the ACF website. Education and employment Less than half of Albany’s students completed high school in 2021 (44 per cent) — 12 per cent lower than the State average. Meanwhile, 11 per cent of Albany’s youth aged 15 to 24 were disengaged in 2021, which means they were neither learning nor earning. In the workforce, Albany has a larger percentage of people working part-time than full-time compared to Geraldton, which has a similar population. “The comparative stuff was really important to give context to a lot of the stats,” Mr Leiper said. “They are scattered throughout the report where we compare to other towns or we would often end up going with regional WA or WA.” Housing and financial stress Mr Leiper said he liked to think his involvement in ACF helped him remain in touch with what was happening in Albany but there were still figures which surprised him. The shortage of childcare availability, which is more widely known now, had initially surprised him along with homeless problems and the “stark” issues of public housing waiting lists. “If they are not in your face then you don’t see them — they are the kind of things we wanted to bring out so people actually realise there is an issue that needs resolving down here,” he said. There were 130 people, including dependants and family members, experiencing homelessness in Albany in May, compared to just 45 in Geraldton in August. The report also shows the disparity in socioeconomic indexes between Albany, which scored 987 on the SEIFA index, compared to WA (1011) and the whole of Australia (1001). Lower numbers represent a higher disadvantage with the Albany suburbs of Lockyer and Gledhow scoring just 883. Milpara and Orana registered slightly higher at 917 while Middleton Beach and Mt Clarence were the highest at 1024 and Lower King was 1029. Belonging An overwhelming majority of surveyed Albany youth believe there continue to be wide-ranging areas of discrimination within the community, which is growing increasingly diverse. On a more positive note, the percentage of Albany’s population who volunteer (21 per cent) was higher than the averages for regional WA (19 per cent), WA (16 per cent) and nationally (14 per cent) at the 2021 census. However, the number of volunteers in Albany fell by 430 between 2016 and 2021. Ms Arbuckle said the figure would likely have been impacted by the COVID restrictions in place at the time of the 2021 census. “It will be interesting to see how much that rebounds or if those volunteers have just not come back,” she said. Health and resilience The number of young people seeking support for mental health concerns at headspace Albany grew by 55 per cent between 2018 and 2022 from 374 to 680. Nearly a third of the Great Southern’s population reported drinking more than two standard drinks a day (27 per cent in 2017-18), about 9 per cent higher than the WA average. And the percentage of Albany’s population that has one or more chronic health conditions (37 per cent in 2021) is 7 per cent higher than both regional WA and WA as a whole.