LegacyWorks seeks $15,000 public funding to expand Wellbeing Dashboard

$15,000 isn’t a huge ask, but it’s still public money—and LegacyWorks Group is requesting $7,500 each from Teton County and the Town of Jackson for FY27 community development funding to expand the Teton Community Wellbeing Dashboard. The application pegs the nonprofit’s annual budget at $481,116, so this request is about 3% of its operating budget, according to the staff report. See: BCC Staff Report — LegacyWorks Group Community Development Funding Application.

The pitch is to build out new “community belonging/connectedness” indicators through 4–6 lived-experience convenings, map resources across cultural networks, and add bilingual (English/Spanish) “data narratives” to the Dashboard. LegacyWorks also proposes re-administering an updated Community Engagement Survey to create longitudinal trendlines on how included and supported residents feel.

Here’s my nit: a dashboard is only as valuable as the decisions it changes. The application cites engagement metrics (like 4,947 unique users since launch and 653 unique visitors to the “Need Housing” page), which are fine as web stats—but they’re not the same as outcome metrics tied to county/town policy choices. If elected officials fund this, they should ask for one concrete, auditable commitment: which programs will use these new indicators, what action will be triggered when a measure moves (or doesn’t), and how often the county/town will see a short report that connects the data work to actual spending or service changes.