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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

Community Tool Box is probably the most extensive (maybe even the best) Community Development resource on the planet. A public service of the Work Group for Community Health and Development at the University of Kansas, it contains (as of this date) over 7,000 pages of practical information. Its purpose is to make it easier for [...]

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 [...]

This is a list compiled by Professor Dick Schoech of the School of Social Work, University of Texas Arlington. He received these suggestions from members of COMM-ORG and ACOSA. Ten of these videos are available on YouTube, and I’ve organized them into this a playlist, which you can play (in the order listed) by clicking [...]

Excerpted from the Community Development section of CDX’s 74-page Resource Briefing, to include only those publications that are available online for free. The Community Development Exchange is a membership-led organization which aims to bring about social justice and equality by using and promoting the values and approaches of community development. More free publications from CDX [...]

This list of free resources for neighborhood-based community building was developed with the help of people like you. To add to the list, please log in then use the submission form that will appear here. Thank you. We monitor this list regularly for broken links, but if you find any, please Leave a Reply below. [...]

The Resident Leadership and Facilitation Training is designed to help participants gain an understanding of the skills needed to lead successful meetings that result in decisions about actions that will achieve desired results. via Resident Leadership and Facilitation Work Book. Annie E. Casey Foundation 2008