RAND experts and Santa Monica city officials discuss the Wellbeing Project, which aimed to evaluate overall community wellbeing and incorporate these results into city planning and governance.
The city of Santa Monica wanted to incorporate wellbeing into city planning, policies, and programs. RAND researchers, as part of a team of experts, helped create a framework for measuring wellbeing and applying the findings to city planning.
On May 20, the long-awaited Metro Expo Line will begin service to Santa Monica. Viewing urban mobility as a key component of community wellbeing may be an instructive way to assess the impact of Expo and other infrastructure efforts.
RAND researchers have partnered with the city of Santa Monica, California to redefine not just how cities measure success, but how they assess their very purpose for being. This “Wellbeing Index” posits that cities can improve not just the safety and comfort of their residents, but also their happiness.
This issue highlights RAND research on new ways to measure wellbeing in cities; effects of cigarette advertising on teens; supermarkets in so-called "food deserts"; the decline of civics education in American schools; and more.
Wellbeing is about individuals having the skills and opportunity to live a meaningful life. There are countless things that cities do that either contribute or detract from that sense of meaning. Santa Monica's Wellbeing Project is working to fundamentally change how the government thinks about its citizens.
In July 2012, the City of Santa Monica Human Services Division and the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District contracted with the RAND Corporation to conduct an assessment of child care programs in Santa Monica.
Researchers examine how well Santa Monica's child care programs meet the needs of families, including child care and early education programs before kindergarten, as well as care for school-aged children, both during the school year and the summer.
RAND is helping its hometown of Santa Monica, Calif., become the first city in America to use a measurement of overall wellbeing to drive public policy.
This briefing offers a menu of potential future activities for the nonaviation lands at Santa Monica Municipal Airport (SMO) to enhance the quality of life in Santa Monica through community-linked programs.
