Tools for Community Development

Too often well-intentioned people are elected or appointed to community boards with little experience or expertise in the myriad of issues facing communities of all sizes. Over the coming weeks, we want to feature some free, online tools that can be accessed in the quick study for community leadership. As budgets tighten, there will less money for consultants and firms. Communities will need to know more in order to manage the economy and development in these lean economic times. One tool we found is from the Mid-America Regional Council. It is a quick-read, helpful tool to sort out some of the issues around community development. MindTools offers an array of planning and scheduling tools, and the Institute for Asset-Based Community Development offers some free downloads to begin to catalogue your community's assets. Add to these a new article on great cities from the Project for Public Spaces and you will get plenty of things to read and think about. These are just a few of the resources that communities can use to build their expertise locally. I would suggest that the community through the United Way or a nonprofit center organize a course of study that new members of civic or governmental boards can complete using free resources. Remember these times call for us to conserve resources but move forward.

Comments

[Dan Bassill]

I think that access to knowledge, and the ability to form on-going learning communities, is one of the real weaknesses of many community leadership groups. In past years I've been part of brainstorming groups where 20-100 leaders have formulated plans for getting millions of dollars of foundation support intended to solve complex community problems. It has always amazed me that such plans are often being made with out drawing upon the research that is available on such topics.

Thus, I support community decision making with an extensive library of links related to social justice, poverty reduction, education, mentoring, etc. This can be found at http://tinyurl.com/2nk56z

What kind of information is included? Today I added a report from the UCLA Center for Mental Health in Schools, titled "Frameworks for Systemic Transformation for Student and Learning Supports". It's a pdf that can be found at http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/systemic/frameworksforsystemictransformation.pdf

This is one of 1400 links on the T/MC site. No one can read all of this in a week, or maybe even a year. Thus, it's critical that leaders in a community create an adult learning network, modeled after faith groups and traditional schools, in which leaders of study groups encourage people to read and discuss bits and pieces of the knowledge as they move through the year.

Each year this cycle of learning repeats, and builds more knowledge among the community of learners. As people begin to apply that knowledge in their own actions, they begin to add their own experiences to the library, expanding what is available to everyone else.

As this knowledge is used for innovation and to support decision making, each community has a wider range of ideas to support the specific problems of their own communities.

The Internet makes this possible, and since this is still a new tool, I'm not sure how many community leaders have this idea in their tool box. However, it's a strategy that I feel most communities, and organizations, could benefit from.