Who We Are

The Long Island Index created the Build a Better Burb competition and maintains the Build a Better Burb website. The Index is a project of the Rauch Foundation, a Long Island-based family foundation established in 1961. The Foundation acts as the convener of the Long Island Index Advisory Committee and the financial underwriter of the Index.

Our Mission

In 2011, the Long Island Press described the Index as “the most definitive status report on the quality of Long Island life.”

Long Island is one region with a shared history, geography, beaches, aquifers, and a shared future.

But from day- to-day, our differences seem more apparent than our similarities. We are 2 counties, 2 cities, 13 towns, 95 incorporated villages, 37 legislative districts. We have 110 library districts, 125 school districts and 187 fire districts plus hundreds of other special districts. Sometimes it is easier to see these as many fragments rather than our shared whole.

We created The Long Island Index to focus on our region as a whole – those things that unite us, issues that can only be understood by looking at the big picture. Whether it is how our economy is changing, the types of jobs we are creating, how well our schools are doing to educate all students, our political structure, the health of our natural environment, or types of housing we’re providing, the Index explores all these issues and more by analyzing how each plays out across our 1,198 square miles.

The Beginning

In November 2002, Nancy Rauch Douzinas, president of the Rauch Foundation, brought together a small group of Long Island’s civic, academic, labor, and business leaders for a conversation about Long Island’s challenges and ways to create change and move the region in a new direction. Realizing the need for a regional understanding of our issues, an Advisory Committee was formed to create a project that would help educate all Long Islanders about these issues facing our continued growth. The Committee identified goals for the Long Island region, including:

• A growing economy that nurtures innovation

• Vibrant communities and downtowns, offering affordable places to live

• An improved regional transportation network
• Quality affordable health care for all Long Islanders
• Educational readiness for all students at every age
• Improved air and water quality, open space preservation, and natural resource conservation
• Fiscally responsible government that provides quality services

The Committee looked at other regions that were succeeding in achieving these goals, places with healthy economies and a high quality of life. They discovered that more than 200 cities and regions across the country — ranging from the Chicago and Boston metropolitan areas to Charlotte to Silicon Valley — have created projects to assess current conditions and track changes over time, in a quantitative, objective way. Most importantly, many of these projects have inspired major regional progress and action. Thus the Long Island Index — which looks at how the Long Island region is doing and how things are changing —was born.

The Index Today

The first Long Island Index report was published in 2004, and answered the question — How is Long Island Doing in meeting the goals established by the Advisory Committee? Since 2004, the Index has been published every year and provides a snapshot of present conditions and a picture of where the Long Island region is.

Because the Index gathers and publishes data annually, the Index is also used to track changes over time. Year after year, the Index provides numerical measures related to the region’s economy, population, housing, public health, education, environment, and governance. These numbers can be compared to each other over time, allowing us to determine whether we’re making progress toward meeting our goals as well as indicating the direction in which trends are headed.

The Index compares data for Long Island to data from similar regions. This allows Long Islanders to compare the Long Island region to similar regions and assess our competitive position. Knowing how Long Island stacks up against similar suburbs elsewhere in the U.S. provides an excellent understanding of how we excel and how we could be doing better. And it gives us a sense of what might be possible.

The Index seeks to inspire Long Islanders to work together in new ways. From stewardship of the natural environment and allocation of water resources to land use decision-making and transportation planning, many issues critical to our future are most effectively addressed when people and institutions collaborate across boundaries. Knowing how we’re functioning today and how we’ve changed over time as well as understanding what other places have done to succeed, gives us the best foundation for improving Long Island. A better future begins with good information.