Hall LIFE Report - Introduction

Introduction Letter to the Hall County Community

Welcome!

The Hall County Family Connection Network is pleased to present the updated Hall LIFE Report to our community!

This report can help identify early warning signs, stimulate community dialogue about positive or negative trends, encourage resident responsibility and accountability, and promote continuous improvement in Hall County.

For many years, the Hall County community has been working to coordinate and improve services for children and families, with the goal to ensure that every child has the opportunity to succeed in school and in life. 

In 2006, with the Hall County Family Connection Network (HCFCN) in the lead, a group of individuals representing a diverse array of community interests including education, government, economic, healthcare, housing, social services and others came together and began discussing their needs for consistent and useful data and information.  The group agreed that there was substantial overlap in the kinds of data they were seeking to track improvement in the community and felt much could be leveraged from a collaborative effort to identify and acquire the data in a way that involved the whole community.  After considerable discussion and research of other national projects, the group embarked on what is now known as the Hall LIFE Report Project.

Everyone involved has worked hard to create a set of indicators that is balanced, comprehensive and thought provoking.  In many cases we found that the existing data does not describe important community issues as well as we would have liked.  In some cases, we realized that there are important elements in our community that are extremely difficult to quantify.  We intend to build upon this inaugural issue and improve these areas in future reports.  We believe that you will find this information useful and informative.  We encourage you to use it in your strategic planning discussions and as a way to spur debate about what it says about Hall life.  Argue with the data and demand new and better indicators that will tell of community life from your perspective.  We hope that this is just the beginning of an inclusive and broad community dialogue about what makes Hall County a special place to live for all of us and our children.

Our work is not done.  We will continue to update the data (as it becomes available) in the  Hall LIFE Report that will illustrate the changes that have occurred both in the well-being of children and families and in our ability to collect and illustrate the data. 

We believe that children and parents and the community working together can mean a brighter future for Hall. 


Hall County Family Connection Network and United Way of Hall County, Inc.