Resources for building & empowering communities – Rebecca Sanborn Stone

in community engagement, community stories, Place-based communities

14th in our Best practices in Community Empowerment series.

Rebecca Sanborn Stone is Senior Associate for Communications at Orton Family Foundation and CommunityMatters. She holds a BA in Biology and English from Williams College, where she helped found the Williams Social Choice Fund for socially responsible investing. She got her MESc from Yale. You can also find Rebecca on Twitter (@rsstone) and Facebook.

On the practice of hoarding or sharing best practices, Rebecca says: I’ve historically seen a fair bit of hoarding, including in my own organization, though not always intentionally. I think a lot of organizations intend to share and collaborate and grow a common set of best practices, but it breaks down because we all want control over what our case studies and resources look like, how we build and share them. I think I see a shift in that trend, though – I’ve recently learned of a number of newer organizations (mostly either run by millennials or at least operating with a millennial mindset) that are bucking this trend and abandoning the ego in favor of true collaboration. It makes organizations like mine stop and take notice and, I hope, will be enough to help us change our ways.

These are Rebecca’s recommended resources:

Changemakers Competitions – Community empowerment for me always starts with inspiration and examples, and I can’t think of a better resource for that than Changemakers. Their competition winners offer so many inspiring stories of people taking control of their communities and coming up with innovative solutions to both local and global challenges. The competition entrants who don’t win are perhaps an even richer resource – the site doubles as a database of creative ideas for community change.

CommunityMatters blog – CommunityMatters helps local leaders and changemakers find collaborative, innovative grassroots solutions to community challenges. The CommunityMatters blog includes information-rich posts and podcasts of conference calls on topics ranging from local foods to placemaking to economic development.

NCDD Resource Center – The NCDD Resource Center is home to more than 2,500 resources for dialogue and deliberation, including dialogue guides, case studies, tools, and evaluation methods. Dialogue and democratic participation are at the heart of all community empowerment, and NCDD is at the heart of this movement.

Cause Communications Toolkit – Cause Communications publishes a Non-profit Communications Toolkit, as well as other resources related to networks, online outreach tools, and print and presentation design. It might seem only peripherally related to community empowerment, but we find that so many community initiatives stall because they fail to communicate with or reach citizens. The Cause Communications guides are some of the best resources around for improving effectiveness in communications.

Deep Economy (Bill McKibben) – It’s not free, and not an obvious choice, but I have to list it. I see so many aspects of community empowerment leading back to the “local” movement today – buy local / grow local / eat local / work local / etc. Bill McKibben’s book was at the forefront of the local movement, and is one of the best articulation’s I’ve seen for why local economies and community empowerment have to go hand in hand. [Check a library near you]

Building community in neighborhoods

The following resources on Rebecca’s list are more focused on building community in neighborhoods. As Rebecca notes: There are several great databases and resources out there with examples of community initiatives, and instructions on how to do it, but I wouldn’t limit myself to the neighborhood level. Lessons from small town and rural planning would apply very well to neighborhood community building, and the resources I’d recommend would point people in that direction.

CommunityPlanning.net – The Community Planning Handbook by Nick Wates is one of the best publications, with ideas for planning-related tools to engage citizens, identify what matters to communities, and plan for the future – especially in an international context. Communityplanning.net is a free online database listing most of the resources from his book.

Planning Tool Exchange – The Planning Tool Exchange is an online hub for tools, resources, and organizations in community planning and civic engagement. We invite all users to find and contribute resources and help grow an information bank for communities.

Heart & Soul Community Planning Handbook – The Heart & Soul Community Planning Handbook helps communities engage citizens and take control of their future. Chapters include network analysis and stakeholder identification, outreach and communications, storytelling, and engaging youth. I recommend this because it’s at the heart of our work and it’s one of the resources I know best; neighborhoods looking to engage citizens would learn a lot from the small town planning examples included here.

Animating Democracy database – This database focuses on projects that use the arts to build dialogue, engage citizens, and work through difficult civic issues. Many of the projects are replicable, but even if they’re not a perfect fit for other communities and neighborhoods, they inspire creative thinking about unorthodox community tools.

PPS Placemaking 101 Articles – PPS’s resource collection includes how-tos, articles, principles, tools, and just about everything else a community would need to understand how placemaking can help and how to get started.

 

Introducing Neighbor Chalk!

in community engagement, community stories, Place-based communities

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.

Neighbor Chalk is an international public art project that encourages people to create sidewalk chalk art in front of their homes and around their neighborhood to create a welcoming environment for their neighbors and passers by.

  1. Create an event at www.meetup.com/neighborchalk
  2. Invite your neighbors to join you or create their own event
  3. Create sidewalk chalk art, have fun and meet your neighbors
  4. Take pictures and upload them our facebook page to flickr and tag them with “NeighborChalk”
  5. Tweet about your event using the hastag #NeighborChalk
  6. Follow @NeighborChalk
  7. “Like” us on Facebook
  8. Interested in becoming a Partner? Please fill out our Partner Inquiry Form

Chalk it up! | Promote Your Page Too

Images of Traditional Communities in Hong Kong

in community engagement, community stories, Place-based communities

This is a selection of eclectic images of Hong Kong communities from P H Yang Photography.

Hakka means “guest people”, the wandering tribe in China, without a true home. Since the days of the Sung Dynasty, a thousand years back, they have migrated to almost every province in China, and have formed a substantial minority in Taiwan, Hong Kong and South-east Asia.

Some of the largest Hakka communities can be found in Kam Tin, near Yuen Long in the New Territories, Hong Kong.


Hakka Women
Kam Tin · Hong Kong | 2009


Hakka Women
Kam Tin · Hong Kong | 2009


Clan (Ancestral) Hall
Yuen Long · Hong Kong | 2009

Click on the above images to view more…

Feeling Artsy? Help Finish Myrtle’s Mural

in community engagement, community stories, Place-based communities

[ takeaway: murals brings community; and they're fun ]

Wanted: local painters, no artistic training required.

Tomorrow the Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Project and the South of Navy Yards Artists will roll out brushes, pencils and buckets of paint for the young, and young at heart, to put the final brush strokes on a community mural.

Since last Sunday, local residents have been adding their artistic flair to the 80-foot stretch of wooden fencing that surrounds the gaping hole left by the collapse of a Myrtle Avenue building on June 21. What could have been an eyesore is now a collage of blue, gray, purple, green, red and white mixed with drawings of everything from hearts to peace signs to faces.

“Collaboratively painting large scale murals like this allow the whole community to come together to create something,” said Ellie Balk, a SONYA board member who is supervising the project. “Kids and parents paint together and can walk by later and take ownership of the whole mural. I love to hear people walk by and say, ‘I did that!’”

The mural is part of the Move About Myrtle project that MARP started on Sept. 7, closing off seven blocks along Myrtle Avenue to create temporary, vehicle-free public space on Sundays in September. Tomorrow is the last day of the street closing.

“We organize a number of different activities to take place during the event to ‘program’ this new public space,” said Meredith Phillips Almeida, director of community Development for MARP, which is marking its 10th year. “And this mural is one of those activities.”

Organizers see the mural as an opportunity to build and strengthen a sense of community through painting. Business owners, as well as residents, are appreciating the locally made art.

For Chong Kim, owner of the J. Love Gift Shop on Myrtle Avenue, the opportunity to share art is cause for celebration.

“It is very beautiful,” said Mr. Kim, who brought his grandchildren to see the mural last Sunday. “You see everybody painting with the kids.”

Read the full story: Feeling Artsy? Help Finish Myrtle’s Mural – The Local – Fort-Greene Blog – NYTimes.com By Ines Bebea