How Local Communities Can Align with United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals: A Santa Cruz County Case Study

Abstract

For local community indicator-driven programming, localizing international well-being standards, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), increases the capacity to connect, interact, and engage with systems at both the international level and the local, individual level. Making efforts to connect local communities to SDGs means more than just achieving these broader, international aims. It means incorporating best practices strategies into serving the youth, adults, households, and individuals that make up these local communities. These members are the most critical partners in connecting local communities to become more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable.Currently, counties in California’s San Francisco Bay Area are working with their local communities to localize SDGs. Santa Cruz County, a small beach community on the central coast of the state, is one of these counties that is changing the way they engage with and connect to SDGs. This article uses Santa Cruz County as a case study to understand how to mainstream, incentivize, and meaningfully engage with SDGs at the local level. For the past two decades, Santa Cruz County has localized SDGs through implementation of a multi-sector approach, which includes a combination of tracking community wellbeing through a robust community assessment project, providing youth violence prevention programs, and releasing reports focused on youth wellbeing. These consistent efforts are supported by including applicable and measurable objectives and goals found at the local, state, and national levels. Examples of these efforts include: (1) Healthy People 2020, released by the US Department of Health and Human Services, is a series of goals that Santa Cruz County integrates into its community indicator programs, which benchmark local progress; and (2) County Health Rankings, under the auspices of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, provide an additional schema from which to improve and progress toward the frameworks discussed at the international level. Collectively, these programs facilitate Santa Cruz County’s continuous efforts toward achieving equity and eliminating disparities and ultimately creating social and physical environments that promote sustainable development standards for all.KeywordsCommunity assessmentCommunity indicatorsSDG conditionsSustainable Development GoalsSDGLocalizationWellbeingSanta Cruz CountyCAP