Community Tool Box announces partnership with Our Blocks

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Very grateful to have Christina Holt and Jami Jones join the Blockheads. They do great work at the Community Tool Box, where I volunteer, and it’s inspiring to be able to work with them here as well. As more such stellar people and organizations join us in our efforts to bring you field-tested ideas and tools to make a difference in your neighborhoods, we hope to be able to serve you even weller (no that’s not a real word, I don’t think). Here’s CTB’s announcement:

Our Blocks

Collaboration is a key idea we at the Community Tool Box teach; Chapter 24, Section 3 to be exact.  We emphasize the importance of networking, coordination, cooperation and collaboration as possible relationships that can exist between organizations.

The Community Tool Box was recently introduced to Our Blocks, an online collaborative site connecting people who want to work together to make a difference in the places they live, work and play.

Purple Line

How does it work?

Their writers summarize materials online into concise, easy to read articles, filled with important tags, links and information.  They provide real-life examples of the work occurring in neighborhoods through their community stories.  Additionally, there is an extensive online library with lists of resources available for anyone interested in grassroots community building.

Capturing important topics, such as community engagement, grassroots organizing, and placemaking, the writers for Our Blocks summarize the work being done by coalitions, non-profits and individuals, highlighting their stories, the resources they provide to the greater global community and examples of real-life application of these concepts.

Their site serves primarily as a blog, with extensive links for their libraries, case examples and partners/featured collaborators, however they also use Twitter and other social media tools to network with the community at large.

Our Blocks is entirely supported by the efforts of volunteers. The co-editors are a collective group of individuals working in positions to support community health and development by advocating for improvement and change in their local communities.

Are you interested in learning more and even contributing to the efforts of Our Blocks?  Visit their site: http://ourblocks.net

We at the Community Tool Box are grateful for partnerships with organizations such as Our Blocks, as it brings to light our resources and allows us to share with the global community the tools we offer.  Our Blocks did an amazing write-up about us, which you can read here.

Neighborhood-based community building handbooks recommended by Jim Diers

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“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 the Asset-Based Community Development Institute).

Jim’s been dragged all over the world by people and orgs keen to learn from his real-world experience as a community builder. He’s currently on a tour through Ireland, England, Australia, New Zealand, India, Canada, and the US. (It’s not really a book tour, but a lot of the discussions revolve around the ideas and practices detailed in his must-read book Neighbor Power.) Yet he somehow found time to answer my request.

In my own experience as a community organizer, I’ve found that it’s so much easier to get things moving when people don’t have to first invent the wheel. So I like workbooks. Our Blocks recently featured one workbook,which I thought was the best I’d seen so far. I asked Jim if others came to mind. He said he’d give it more thought when he had more time, but off the top of his head:

  1. The Organizer’s Workbook, published by the Indianapolis Neighborhood Resource Center -  a roadmap to discovering, organizing and engaging your neighborhood. (This is the workbook we’d previously featured, as noted above. Incidentally, I corresponded this week with INRC Executive Director Anne-Marie Taylor, who said she’d “love to hear how folks outside of Indianapolis are utilizing this Workbook”.)
  2. The Great Neighborhood Book, by Jay Walljasper, published by PPS. (In the Great Minds Think Alike category, this book was also recommended to us by UMass Professor Emeritus Bill Berkowitz, Development Partner at the Community Tool Box.)

Not a workbook, but something Jim brought up in relation to my plans to do community-building work in the Philippines: From Clients to Citizens – Deepening the Practice of Asset-Based and Citizen-Led Development (pdf) – Conversations from the ABCD Forum, July 8 – 10, 2009. Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada. Edited by Alison Mathie and Deborah Puntenney. December 2009. The Coady International Institute published this under a CC-ANSA license, very nice of them.

Thanks for your recommendations Jim.

Other recent articles on Jim Diers by friends of Our Blocks: Jim Diers on citizen action by Kevin Harris at Neighborhoods; Getting back to Government Is Us at Socialreporter (which includes a beer-powered interview by David Wilcox). You can also find Jim’s talks on The Youtubes, three of which (so far) we’ve added to our Videos collection. Not recent but still fresh, this hour-long conversation on KUOW (note: turns out there’s a difference between mating calls and meeting calls).

Neighborhood resources from Bill Berkowitz

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UMass Professor Emeritus Bill Berkowitz sent us these recommended resources:

  • The Community Tool Box, a service of the Work Group for Community Health and Development at the University of Kansas – the world’s largest resource for free information on essential skills for building healthy communities. It offers more than 7,000 pages of practical guidance in creating change and improvement, and is growing as a global resource for this work.
  • Neighborhood Resources at the Society for Community Research and Action – “circa 2006, though at this point that could probably use some updating”.

Dr. Berkowitz adds: “As for books, two useful ones I’ve come across fairly recently are The Great Neighborhood Book, by Jay Walljasper, which focuses on creating public spaces, and Superbia!: 31 ways to create sustainable neighborhoods, by Dan Chiras and Dave Wann, which deals with ideas for improving and sustaining neighborhood life in the suburbs (the suburbs tend to get underplayed in the neighborhood literature, though that’s where roughly half the American population lives). Both are published by New Society Publishers.”

Thank you Bill!

ctb