Group items tagged

ABOUT THE COMMUNITY TOOL BOX The Community Tool Box is a free, online resource for those working to build healthier communities and bring about social change. It offers thousands of pages of tips and tools for taking action in communities. Want to learn about community assessment, planning, intervention, evaluation, advocacy, and other aspects of community practice? Then help yourself to over 300 educational modules and other free tools. Under continuous development since 1994, the Community Tool Box is widely used in teaching, training, and technical support. Currently available in English, Spanish, and Arabic and with millions of user sessions annually, it has reached those working in over 230 countries around the world.

The Community Tool Box is a free, online resource for those working to build healthier communities and bring about social change. Our mission is to promote community health and development by connecting people, ideas, and resources.

Bottom line, we want to do two big things better: Demystify congressional advocacy. We get hundreds of questions every day about what Congress is doing, how to organize locally (see the toolkit!), and how to advocate in different situations. We're going to start sending out timely updates and resources on what's going on in Congress and how you can best organize, make your voice heard, and influence your members of Congress.   Support the community of local groups putting the Indivisible Guide into action. We want to provide shared tools to help groups organize events, communicate with each other, and share best practices and resources. This also means spotlighting local successes and supporting a sense of a shared purpose. You can see that shared purpose already forming-just look at this beautiful movement on Rachel Maddow.

P2PU is a grassroots network of individuals who seek to create an equitable, empowering, and liberating alternative to mainstream higher education. We work towards this vision by creating and sustaining learning communities in public spaces around the world. As librarians and community organizers, we bring neighborhoods together to learn with one another. As educators, we train facilitators to organize their own networks and we develop/curate open educational resources. As developers and designers, we build open source software tools that support flourishing learning communities. And as learners, we work together to improve upon and disseminate methods and practices for peer learning to flourish.

Democracy Beyond Elections is a collaborative, national campaign dedicated to transformative democracy rooted in community led decision making.  It is not enough to get the right person elected or to know that those closest to the issues are closest to the solutions - we must act on this knowledge and put real decision making power in community hands. This means equipping community-members often ignored, pushed out, or marginalized by our current democratic systems with the tools, resources, and opportunities to deeply engage in democratic processes. This means committing to radically reimagine what participation and civic engagement really entail - including tangible and consequential power sharing. And this means expanding our definition of democracy to extend between and beyond elections in participatory practices that include everyone.

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. 

The following is a collection of tools from ABCD faculty members as well as individuals and organizations that embody the principles of ABCD in their work. The addition of the toolkit was made possible by a generous grant from the Alumnae of Northwestern University, the institute's former home.

"APPA can be applied in a variety of contexts and with a wide range of participants. Its primary value lies in its emphasis as a process of lasting engagement and dialogue among stakeholders. APPA combines the framework of Appreciative Inquiry and the tools of Participatory Learning and Action (PLA). Its objective is to find and emphasise the positive, successes and strengths as a means to empower communities, groups and organisations to plan and manage development and conservation. [It] uses the cycle of the 4D�s: Discovery, the act of appreciation: the best of what is and what gives life to the community, group or organisation; Dream, envisioning and impact: what might be, creating a positive image of a preferred future; Design, co-constructing the desired future: what should the ideal be, a process of dialogue, consensus and further inquiry; Delivery, sustaining: how to empower, learn, adjust and sustain." (Source: PPM&E Resource Portal)

CommunityMatters prepares communities to re-create themselves. Many people are already speaking up, reaching out and acting on their ideas, and those efforts need support. We offer the tools, resources and expertise that communities need, when they need them. Whether you're interested in building consensus for a school budget, using values to drive local decisions, or identifying technology to facilitate conversation, we stand ready to help.

The Energy Upgrade California Community is the online home for organizations throughout California that have joined the Keep It Golden™ movement. Each organization, business, and group is united in its commitment to support California as we work together to double our state's energy efficiency. In the Energy Upgrade California Community, you'll find great resources that will guide your organization in making smart energy choices and becoming expert energy managers. We are here to give you the tools, knowledge, and inspiration you need to help your organization become an energy leader in your community.

Indivisible435 is here to serve you as you take the reins of our political system. This site will serve as a homebase for the resources and tools we'll be rolling out ahead of next year's elections. We'll be posting new guides and explainers regularly, on topics as varied as "Money in Politics," "Election Messaging," and "Finding the Right Candidate." We'll also be providing access to key voter contact tools, electoral engagement trainings, and a voter registration tool available today. See About section

Since the 2011 Stanford Social Innovation Review article introduced the concept, collective impact has been widely adopted as an effective form of cross-sector collaboration to address complex social and environmental challenges. Though collective impact has proven to be a powerful approach in tackling a wide range of issues in communities all over the world, many practitioners are searching for the tools they need to be successful in this work. The thought leadership and resources below, and in the Resources and Blog sections of this website, will help you build a foundation for doing this work

Changeologists everywhere: people who are focused on making change happen in their communities, workplaces, and organisations. It's about "what works" in enabling change in fields like sustainability, health, road safety, natural resource management and emergency management. The focus is on ways of thinking that challenge our assumptions, on innovative tools, products, and resources, and on new processes, especially those for facilitating highly diverse groups. It's a rapidly changing field, with plenty to be inspired about, and always something new.

The Sunlight Foundation is a non-profit, nonpartisan organization that uses the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency, and provides new tools and resources for media and citizens, alike. We are committed to improving access to government information by making it available online, indeed redefining "public" information as meaning "online," and by creating new tools and websites to enable individuals and communities to better access that information and put it to use.

The American Library Association (ALA) is the oldest and largest library association in the world. Founded on October 6, 1876 during the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the mission of ALA is "to provide leadership for the development, promotion and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all."

Facebook page - Anyone can join the Participedia community and help crowdsource, catalogue and compare participatory political processes around the world. All content on Participedia is collaboratively produced and open-source under a Creative Commons License. Explore: Search, read, download and gain insight from our database of cases, methods, and organizations. Create: Help improve the quality of this knowledge resource by editing existing content or publishing your own. Teach: Use Participedia in the classroom as a tool to engage students and showcase their research.

Collaboration is appealing in concept but challenging in practice. While extensive resources-including ones from the Community Tool Box, The Intersector Project, and NewNetworkLeader.org-exist online to support collaborative efforts, the fact remains that we human beings are simply not very good at making "we" work. And yet, most changemakers today acknowledge that to address the complex social and environmental challenges we face we must learn how to collaborate-across organizations, sectors, networks, and differences. Effective collaboration must become a reality, not just an aspiration.

We are technologists, community organizers, entrepreneurs, activists, and artists working for the greatest good of all beings. We amplify cooperation among people working to regenerate our communities and our planet. We do this by building systems and tools that foster trust and collaboration, starting in the Bay Area bioregion.

Participedia's searchable database of democratic innovations is made up of three distinct content types including Cases, Methods and Organizations. Bolstering this knowledge base are added resources, including surveys, teaching tools and external data sets. The initial vision for Participedia was developed by Archon Fung (Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University) and Mark E. Warren (Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia), and is guided by a set of standing committees.

As our most valuable resource, soil drives our services and tools. We advocate for sustainable agriculture that has a positive impact on the environment, society and the economy. To this end, we support the agri-food sector through sustainability assessments, agricultural consultancy and relevant software solutions.