The Community Tool Box is hosting a global prize contest for community innovations. The 2010 “Out of the Box” prize will recognize and honor promising initiatives from around the world that improve community development and community health. To learn more and to download an application form, please visit http://ctb.ku.edu/en/out_of_the_box.aspx.

Excerpts from From the Ground Up: Community’s Role in Addressing Street Level Social Issues, by Jim Diers. This is the fourth report of the Core Challenge Initiative, a three-year public policy research and communications project, and a major component of the Western Cities Project of the CanadaWest Foundation. Building strong communities is not easy. Even [...]

Pew’s Neighbors Online report, published Wednesday, provides baseline data on neighborhood communications. Join the Q&A with author Aaron Smith, over at e-democracy.org’s Locals Online. Several media outlets reported on the report, and here are a few that did more than reprint the overview: Chicago Sun-Times: Folks use digital tools to take role in community – [...]

Fellow Neighborhood Organizers, It’s Joseph Porcelli, I’m the Chief Executive Neighbors at NeighborsForNeighbors.org and I’m also one of the editors here on Our Blocks. It’s summer time and one the pleasures of summer is making sidewalk chalk. So today, NeighborsForNeighbors.org is launching Neighbor Chalk and we’re inviting you to join us and help spread the word. [...]

From The Spirit of Coalition, by Bill Berkowitz and Tom Wolff © 2000 American Public Health Association. Dr. Berkowitz has been involved in creating, directing, and writing about community programs for over 35 years. His previous books, Community Impact, Community Dreams, and Local Heroes deal with the skills, ideas, and personal qualities involved in successful [...]

The Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance is bringing together a panel of people who have helped communities create great neighborhoods across the country. Our guests will share their years of experience helping to make great places to live, work and play. Enjoy a complimentary breakfast while you learn about strategies to create places that are affordable, [...]

These are some resources you can use to plan community-building activities in your neighborhood around National Night Out, August 3, 2010 (unless you’re in Texas: 10/5). The National Night Out website. From the About page: NNO is designed to Heighten crime and drug prevention awareness; Generate support for, and participation in, local anticrime programs; Strengthen [...]

Ashoka Fellow Steven Clift recently created the Locals Online forum on e-democracy.org, to bring together people round the world who are working to connect neighbors with one another. In his April 21 post, he noted: “From neighborhood e-mail lists to social networks, placeblogs to block-level Facebook groups, thousands of people are doing what we are [...]

According to Caroline Haythornthwaite and Lori Kendall, professors in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Illinois, online interactions not only have positive outcomes for real-life, place-based communities, but the intersection between online communication and the offline world also forms two halves of a support mechanism for communities. As information and communication technologies [...]

Toward the end of 2009, the Craigslist Foundation began a series of discussions around their plans to focus the foundation’s efforts on strengthening communities, with some emphasis on neighborhood-based communities. This began with a meeting at The Case Foundation in Washington DC, which included Michael Smith, Kari Dunn, Cindy Gallop, Jessica Kirkwood, Marsha Semmel, Michael [...]