Using Your Community's Socioeconomic Profile

Skill Building

For many people, understanding and interpreting economic information seems to be a daunting and time consuming task. For some, gathering economic data generated by multiple government agencies into one document and then try to view it in a local context can be overwhelming. As a result, few can fully grasp economic issues, or how to assess the economic well being of a community.

This workshop will accomplish two objectives: First to demonstrate how a community in Montana is using the Sonoran Institute's Economic Profile System (EPS) to better understand its' present economic situation and to plan for its future by understand its past and second, to briefly explain the EPS and how it functions.

The Sonoran Institute has developed the automated EPS to generate custom socio-economic profiles. EPS allows anyone to automatically and efficiently produce customized socio-economic profiles for any geography in the United States. The profile contains tables and figures that illustrate long-term trends in population; employment and personal income by industry; average earnings; business development; retirement and other non-labor income; commuting patterns; and agriculture.

The Sonoran Institute, in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management, developed the EPS to produce custom socioeconomic profiles at the national, regional, state, county, and community levels. This information can be accessed on line at no cost, and profiles generated immediately. Moreover, the profiles provide significant guidance to the user on interpreting the data. These profiles are already widely used by federal land management agencies, county planners, elected officials, and numerous other organizations.