via Serve.gov | Stories of Service: Profiles in Service: AmeriCorps Member Revitalizes Neighborhood. By Fred Wong On April 21, 2009, President Obama signed the Serve America Act into law – the most sweeping expansion of national service in a generation. To mark the one year anniversary, we are going to spotlight the stories of everyday [...]

Here’s a tool you might be able to use to get a better appreciation of the interests, skills, and needs of your constituents, and to help them connect with one another, and with other local resources. You can download the pdf by clicking on the image below. You can also edit and download the form, [...]

Excerpts from Neighbor Power, by Jim Diers. I will conclude by summarizing what I have learned about community, community organizing, community initiatives, and the role of government. A neighborhood is not the same as a community. A neighborhood is a geographic area that people share, while at community is a group of people who identify [...]

“Few people in this country know as much about community building as Jim Diers,” said  Fred Kent, President of Project for Public Spaces (PPS). From 1988 to 2002, Jim led Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods which is “widely known as the most innovative effort in the U.S. to empower local residents” (John P. Kretzmann, Co-director or [...]

From the abstract to Mapping the Assets of Your Community: A Key Component for Building Local Capacity , by Lionel J. Beaulieu, Southern Rural Development Center: Asset mapping is an effective tool for understanding the wealth of talent and resources that exists in each community–even those with small populations or suffering from poverty and economic [...]

This easy-to-use and visually attractive guide, from the Indianapolis Neighborhood Resource Center, is a roadmap to discovering, organizing and engaging your neighborhood. It takes you through the steps of community building – from identifying assets to running effective meetings – and uses real-life case studies and plenty of hands-on activities. You can download the complete [...]

Highlights from Voices From the Field II: Reflections on Comprehensive Community Change, by Anne C. Kubisch, Patricia Auspos, Prudence Brown, Robert Chaskin, Karen Fulbright-Anderson, and Ralph Hamilton. Washington, D.C.: Aspen Institute. Community capacity: the interaction of human capital, organizational resources, and social capital existing within a given community that can be leveraged to solve collective [...]

Thanks to Richard Layman for pointing us to PPS, and to Bill Berkowitz for recommending the book. The Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people create and sustain public places that build communities. It has identified 11 key elements in transforming public spaces into vibrant community places, whether they’re [...]

In Empowering Neighborhoods and Restoring Play, Psychology Today columnist Peter Gray asked his readers to help him develop a proposal to build a neighborhood play and learning center “that could serve as a model that communities everywhere might emulate”. I said I’d help, and after putting in a few hours, recommended that he check out [...]

Source: Discovering Community Power: A Guide to Mobilizing Local Assets and Your Organization’s Capacity | The Habitat Exchange. A. From Greyrock Commons Co-Housing Community GIFTS I CAN GIVE MY COMMUNITY GIFTS OF THE HEAD Things I know something about and would enjoy talking about with others, e.g., art, history, movies, birds. GIFTS OF THE HANDS [...]