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 – [...]

via Serve.gov | Stories of Service: Profiles in Service: AmeriCorps Member Revitalizes Neighborhood. By Fred Wong On April 21, 2009, President Obama signed the Serve America Act into law – the most sweeping expansion of national service in a generation. To mark the one year anniversary, we are going to spotlight the stories of everyday [...]

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 [...]

When the Action 13 neighborhood association held a meeting Thursday to provide information for residents looking to start local block watch programs, a crowd of 30 people came out to join the discussion. Earlier this month, nearly 50 people attended the Dutch Hill association meeting to discuss quality-of-life issues and the largest annual event for [...]

Bill Traynor is a leading theoretician and practitioner in the field of community development. He is currently the Executive Director of Lawrence Community Works, an initiative that’s rebuilding the struggling city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, his hometown. He was the Director of Community Development for the Boston Community Training and Assistance Center, and the Executive Director [...]

Reflections on Community Organizing and Resident Engagement in the Rebuilding Communities Initiative. Bill Traynor. Annie E. Casey Foundation. Reflections of a community’s struggle with resident engagement and community organizing. The report’s focus in on understanding the role and practice of community organizing and resident engagement in the context of a comprehensive community change initiative. Highlights: [...]