What is the Quality of Life Framework?

The ultimate goal of neighborhood revitalization is to improve quality of life, which is defined as a sense of wellbeing and happiness experienced by individuals, groups and communities. This guide will help you and your neighbors determine how to improve the quality of life in your neighborhood.

Ten long-term outcomes

The Quality of Life framework includes a map and 10 outcome pathways that represent intermediate and long-term outcomes required to sustain efforts to improve lives. The framework was created by people who have decades of experience working to improve the quality of life in neighborhoods. This guide is organized around 10 long-term outcomes — three foundational outcomes and seven sector outcomes. Each outcome has a pathway with activities and indicators to measure progress, and all 10 are on the map, which shows how they relate to one another. Each pathway also refers to intermediate outcomes, which are prerequisites to meeting the outcome at the top of each pathway. To create lasting change, community efforts must focus first on three foundational outcomes:

• Sense of community — Identifying with the neighborhood, feeling connected and supporting one another.

• Social cohesion — Being willing and able to work together.

• Collective action — Sustaining ongoing projects and advocacy efforts.

Only after investing significant time and resources in the foundational outcomes do neighborhoods turn their attention to select sector priorities within the other seven long-term outcomes:

• Amenities — Access to, and preservation of, consumer, social and recreational amenities.

• Economic opportunities — Access to employment with fair, livable wages.

• Education — Lifelong learning opportunities and support for educational success for children.

• Health — An environment that supports physical and emotional health.

• Housing — Access to decent, safe, stable and affordable housing.

• Safety — A sense of personal safety.

• Transportation — Options and access to safe and affordable transportation.

The framework is based on four assumptions, recognizes 10 common barriers, identifies four lenses to provide focus and doggedly asserts that all neighborhoods contain assets that can contribute to community transformation.

Four assumptions

• Customization: Every neighborhood is unique, with specifics that greatly impact neighborhood priorities.

• Sustainable and systemic: In a revitalizing neighborhood, the quality of life improvements are sustained over time and systemic, so that we can be assured that we aren’t just treating symptoms, but addressing root causes.

• The foundational outcomes are foundational: Focus on the three foundational outcomes first to build capacity, skills, relationships and knowledge to fuel future work.

• Iterative pathway: Neighborhoods travel in both directions along the pathways to revisit the foundational outcomes, reinforce capacities and strengthen relationships.

Ten common barriers to lasting community change

• Cycle of poverty.

• Displacement of residents and neighborhood culture.

• Individual prejudice and bigotry.

• Inequitable and predatory policies and systems.

• Institutionalized racism.

• Lack of localized and citizen political power and voice.

• Lack of market control.

• Neighborhood disinvestment.

• Poor design and land use.

• Regular shifts in the demographic makeup of neighborhoods.

Four lenses

A lens provides focus or modifies how something is seen. This framework uses the following four lenses:

• An approach based on residents’ strengths.

• Equity.

• Multisector collaboration.

• Systems approach.