community building

A few months ago we asked you to share ideas about how to support communities who are  taking action and producing solutions to the problems they care about most.  Now we're sharing some of your ideas, as well as some of our own findings through a community leadership project for the Bush Foundation.  In this article we share key elements of community change and important capacities being cultivated by community leadership programs.

Elements of Community Change

Neighborhoods and communities all across the country are struggling economically; many communities do not have jobs, access to healthy foods, healthy places to live, clean air, parks, quality education, or the social and financial capital that enable families and children to grow up educated, healthy, and secure.  And yet there are hundreds of ways in which groups of citizens are working together to improve their communities. They are organizing youth, creating community gardens, addressing racial tensions and conflict, and seeking more effective ways to use scarce resources. We are learning from these stories about the kinds of support that enliven community spirit, encourage dialogue and catalyze action.  The elements are drawn from a quick scan and aggregation of a number of different resources that have been produced around building community capacity.  These elements are organized into different categories but are present in much of the research and evaluation findings. read more »