Community Tool Box is Turning 20! Feel free to access it and also make a contribution to it...

[Glenn Williams]

Hi all

Message from Bill Berkowitz, University of Massachusetts Lowell:

There is one other link that might be of interest is the community tool box,

"It was set up in 1994 by Steve Fawcett and Jerry Schultz, community psychologists at the University of Kansas, together with Vince Francisco, who’s now at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Here's the link: http://ctb.ku.edu/en

The organisation of the community tool box has since expanded to a national team with international partnerships, such as the Pan American Health Organization. The World Health Organization has also designated the Tool Box as a global Collaborating Center.

Its features are as follows:

• Thousands of pages of free instructional materials:
• More than 300 how-to-do-it modules on a wide variety of community topics, ranging from training volunteers to lobbying decisionmakers, and from budget writing to multicultural collaboration
• Quick-start Toolkits on 16 key community competencies  (sample titles: Creating and Maintaining Partnerships; Assessing Community Needs and Resources),  with detailed outlines of key action tasks
• 16 Training Guides, paralleling the Toolkits, each with full lesson plans, participant guides, and interactive exercises
• A Troubleshooting Guide, with helpful advice for common problems a community worker might encounter
• A distinctive Ask an Advisor feature, where anyone can ask a question on community development and receive a personalized answer from an expert.

The Tool Box is also interested in other contributions or suggestions users and readers may have; they are invited to contact [e-mail], or call [phone].   Your own community-building content and your ideas will further strengthen community life. But another purpose can then be accomplished too: to strengthen a sense of community among all of us who do the critical work of community building with others. We can work together to achieve our common goals."