Minnesota Compass  (launching Tuesday, January 26, 2010 ) gives everyone in our state - policymakers, business and community leaders, and concerned individuals who live and work here - a common foundation to identify, understand, and act on community issues that affect our communities.

It does this by:

• Providing unbiased, credible information
• Tracking trends and measuring progress on issues that impact our quality of life.
• Identifying disparities by including trend data by race, age, gender and income whenever possible.
• Providing additional resources for addressing issues.

Using Compass

Get facts that matter. Compass gives measurable information in each topic area that shows trends over time. The indicators generally are put into two categories: Key Measures and More Measures.

Key Measures were chosen by topic advisory groups as the most credible and compelling based on criteria developed by a technical committee.

More Measures provide additional data in order to gain a more in-depth understanding of the issue, to improve our quality of life.

Learn how others have tackled an issue.  In each topic area, there is an Ideas at Work section, which is a compendium of local and national strategies and initiatives, backed by research and evaluation, that have been implemented to reach goals and improve quality of life.

Dig deeper . Delve into the virtual library, which contains reports and studies on a wide variety of topics. Don’t see something you think would be of value to others? Recommend it to us.