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, in spreadsheet format, here (some formatting was lost in the file translation).

The form was designed for residents of multi-family subsidized housing communities. We didn’t use some of items from the original Capacity Inventory (Kretzmann & McKnight 1993), but kept them in a separate tab (Skills, column J), so you can just copy & paste as needed.

Most respondents completed the form in under eight minutes, with some, who answered the open-ended questions at the end of the survey, taking up to 15 minutes.

Matt Singh (a fellow founder of the Idealist Silicon Valley group) and I developed the form, which we derived (with thanks) from several sources:

• Mapping Tools and Capacity Inventories from the Asset-Based Community Development Institute
• 150 Things You Can Do to Build Social Capital, The Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement In America, an initiative of Professor Robert D. Putnam at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
• 366 Community Service Ideas, compiled by Janet Fox, 4-H Extension Specialist
• Organizer’s Workbook, from the Indianapolis Neighborhood Resource Center
• An Idealist survey on obstacles to action

We’d appreciate your feedback. And as we roll this out to more residents, we’ll need online/offline tools to make it easier for them to match their interests, needs, and skills with those of their neighbors. Any ideas?