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The mission of the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities is to create strong, sustainable communities by helping communities connect housing to jobs, foster local innovation, and build a clean energy economy. Through its work and in partnership with other federal agencies, local communities and regions, the Office of Sustainable Communities is supporting cutting edge research, innovative and inclusive planning practices, and new strategies for improving energy efficiency in new and existing housing. Underlying this work is an emphasis on leveraging federal investments to create jobs, achieve multiple tax payer benefits for each dollar invested, and support local ingenuity, innovation and partnership.

Community Health Centers serve the primary health care needs of more than 22 million patients in over 9,000 locations across America. They play a crucial role in the nation's health care system, providing affordable health services for millions of uninsured, the working poor and newly jobless Americans. Health centers are good for the country. They lower overall health care costs, improve the health of their patients and generate economic opportunities in the communities they serve by providing jobs and training for local people. Community Health Centers create savings in health care every time a patient opts for an exam and treatment at the first sign of a health issue instead of waiting until a costly emergency room visit or hospitalization is the only option. Each health center takes a tailored approach to meet the unique needs of the people in its surrounding community. That local approach to health care, combined with an emphasis on comprehensive preventative care, generates $24 billion in annual savings to the health care system - for the American taxpayer, local, state and federal governments and public and private payers alike.

Few Americans are aware of the steady build-up of innovative community wealth building strategies throughout the United States. Community-Wealth.org brings together, for the first time, information about the broad range of community wealth building activity.

Founded in 2001, Tamarack is a charity that develops and supports learning communities to help people collaborate and to co-generate knowledge that solves complex community challenges. Our deep hope is to end poverty in Canada.

The Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) catalyzes communities for a regenerative world. GEN is a growing network of regenerative communities and initiatives that bridge cultures, countries, and continents. GEN builds bridges between policy-makers, governments, NGOs, academics, entrepreneurs, activists, community networks and ecologically-minded individuals across the globe in order to develop strategies for a global transition to resilient communities and cultures.

This eventually will lead to a new concept, "mobile networked governance." Community leaders will develop knowledge-connection processes that harness the vast resources of disparate community members. We'll soon see a shift from radical individualism to many new levels of deep collaboration. Ultimately, this mobile networked governance will be transformational, creating a new decision-making structure that engages as many people in the community as are interested.

Code for America hosted Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu for a discussion of their recent book, "Gardens of the Democracy." In it, they challenge Americans to approach the world not as a machinery that needs to be perfected but as a garden that needs constant attention, discretion, and periodic weeding. The book argues that since society and technology have fundamentally changed, so must our notions of citizenship and democracy: turning "the machine" into a garden. 

One Community: A Grassroots Think Tank began as One Pasadena in 2008. One Pasadena was a grassroots nonprofit aimed at building liaisons and increasing communication within the city's neighborhoods and communities.

E-Democracy.org builds online public space in the heart of real democracy and community. Our mission is to harness the power of online tools to support participation in public life, strengthen communities, and build democracy. Starting with the world's first election information website in 1994 in Minnesota, today we host over 50 local Issues Forums in 17 communities across three countries - New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In addition to these "online town halls" and our "community life" forums we promote civic engagement online around the world.

In Slow Democracy, community leader Susan Clark and democracy scholar Woden Teachout describe how citizens around the country are breathing new life into their communities. Large institutions, centralized governments, and top-down thinking are no longer society's drivers. New decision-making techniques are ensuring that local communities-and the citizens who live there-are uniquely suited to meet today's challenges. In Slow Democracy, readers learn the stories of residents who gain community control of water systems and local forests, parents who find creative solutions to divisive and seemingly irreconcilable school-redistricting issues, and a host of other citizen-led actions that are reinvigorating local democracy and decision making.

Resident-Centered Community Building - What Makes It Different? In June 2012, forty-one leaders of community building efforts came together to share strategies and discuss lessons they have learned about how to improve conditions in disadvantaged communities. While gatherings like these happen regularly, this one was unusual; it was designed by and for community residents.

Purpose The Delaware Complete Communities Planning Toolbox aims to help build local government capacity to develop: complete-communities planning approaches, community-design tools, and public engagement strategies.

Founded in 1999, PolicyLink connects the work of people on the ground to the creation of sustainable communities of opportunity that allow everyone to participate and prosper. Such communities offer access to quality jobs, affordable housing, good schools, transportation, and the benefits of healthy food and physical activity. Guided by the belief that those closest to the nation's challenges are central to finding solutions, PolicyLink relies on the wisdom, voice, and experience of local residents and organizations. Lifting Up What Works is our way of focusing attention on how people are working successfully to use local, state, and federal policy to create conditions that benefit everyone, especially people in low-income communities and communities of color. We share our findings and analysis through our publications, website and online tools, convenings, national summits, and in briefings with national and local policymakers. Our work is grounded in the conviction that equity - just and fair inclusion - must drive all policy decisions.

WHAT IS ENERGY JUSTICE? Energy justice refers to the goal of achieving equity in both the social and economic participation in the energy system, while also remediating social, economic, and health burdens on those disproportionately harmed by the energy system. Energy justice explicitly centers the concerns of communities at the frontline of pollution and climate change ("frontline communities"), working class people, indigenous communities, and those historically disenfranchised by racial and social inequity. Energy justice aims to make energy accessible, affordable, clean, and democratically managed for all communities.

This toolkit can help planners, public health professionals, and the general public include health in the community planning process. Developed in partnership between the American Planning Association's Planning and Community Health Research Center and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Healthy Community Design Initiative, the toolkit is composed of four elements that work together to achieve this goal:

A series of posts on "What is….?" which are about concepts and practices relevant to working with communities written by Graeme Stuart, of Sustaining Community Engagement, whose work has been featured on the this blog a couple of times.

The Loughborough Junction Action Group, or LJAG, is an independent group of people who live or work in Loughborough Junction in south-east London. We share the common aim of regenerating and improving the area and the lives of the people who live there. We are embedded in our diverse and vibrant neighbourhood and hold festivals, street parties and monthly gatherings, literary and film events and organise arts activities in local schools. Our members work with many local organisations, such as tenants' and residents' associations, community initiatives such as Building Communities in Coldharbour and the Big Local, which are working on projects designed to empower local people, improve community cohesion and enhance neighbourhood facilities.

Successful community collaboratives require resources and support for their infrastructure needs, as well as the opportunity to engage with like-minded practitioners to share ideas that will amplify their collective impact. To address this need, and build on the work of the White House Council, the Aspen Institute launched the "Aspen Forum for Community Solutions," chaired by Melody Barnes, former Assistant to the President and Director of the Domestic Policy Council for President Obama. Stephen Patrick - formerly with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - is the Executive Director and drives the mission of The Aspen Forum for Community Solutions.

The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (Public Lab) is a community -- supported by a 501(c)3 non-profit -- which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. By democratizing inexpensive and accessible Do-It-Yourself techniques, Public Lab creates a collaborative network of practitioners who actively re-imagine the human relationship with the environment. The core Public Lab program is focused on "civic science" in which we research open source hardware and software tools and methods to generate knowledge and share data about community environmental health. Our goal is to increase the ability of underserved communities to identify, redress, remediate, and create awareness and accountability around environmental concerns. Public Lab achieves this by providing online and offline training, education and support, and by focusing on locally-relevant outcomes that emphasize human capacity and understanding.

The Center for Communication and Civic Engagement is dedicated to understanding communication processes and media technologies that facilitate positive citizen involvement in politics and social life. CCCE is located in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, and co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science. Students and faculty at the center work together on original research, new educational programs, policy recommendations, and Web-based citizen resources.