Activist HandbookOn this page
Community Tool Box is a large collection of guides for people who want to make a difference in their local communities. The library consists of about 1300 articles.
📚 Also check out our list of other websites for activists.
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, Arabic, and Farsi, and with millions of user sessions annually, it has reached those working in over 230 countries around the world.
Websites:
Vision
The vision behind the Community Tool Box is that people — locally and globally — are better prepared to work together to change conditions that affect their lives. Our mission is to promote community health and development by connecting people, ideas, and resources.
With the belief that people can change their communities for the better, and informed by disciplines including applied behavior analysis, public health, and community psychology, partners at the University of Kansas and collaborating organizations developed the Community Tool Box as a public service.
Our fervent hope is that these tools can make it easier for people to take action to assure healthier and more just communities throughout the world.
Learn more about the Community Tool Box as team member Christina Holt delivers an address to St. Louis community members:
Services
The Community Tool Box is a public service of the Center for Community Health and Development at the University of Kansas. The Center also provides a variety of services including technical assistance and training and participatory evaluation of community-based efforts.
Funding
The Tool Box is sustained solely through donations at the private, university, and corporate level. As a supporter, your donation assures these tools for change remain available to communities. With your generous contribution, people on a local and global level can more effectively engage in community work, learning to assess, plan, evaluate, and sustain their efforts.
History
The Community Tool Box was founded in 1995 by colleagues at the University of Kansas (including Stephen Fawcett, Jerry Schultz, and Vincent Francisco) in partnership with other national partners, including Bill Berkowitz and Tom Wolff. Phil Rabinowitz has been a major contributor to content for the Community Tool Box. The website was created by the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies at the university. With over 7,000 pages of information, the Community Tool Box contains guides and aids for problem solving common barriers faced in community development. In 2006, the website had a daily average of 3,315 visitors. It was initially an offline project which provided information to people about substance abuse and gun violence but later expanded to the Internet so that it could reach more people. The website serves as a resource for community improvement efforts, and has become widely used as text for courses in the following disciplines: public health, community health, social work, community psychology, and nursing.
The development of the Community Tool Box has been supported by funds from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Kansas Health Foundation.
Review
Why this resource is great:
Very extensive
Well organised
Based on academic research
All licensed under Creative commons!
Why this resource is not so great:
Difficult language used
Focussed on local communities, but overlooks bigger systemic issues. Almost all strategies proposed focus on making a difference locally. While this is great for people who want to make a direct impact, it doesn't bring us closer to something like radically overhauling our toxic capitalist society.
Focus on US context
Contents
This section lists 46 Chapters through which you can obtain practical, step-by-step guidance in community-building skills. See also the related Toolkits, which offer short outlines for key tasks.
Overview
An overview of the Community Tool Box and frameworks for guiding, supporting and evaluating the work of community and system change.
Chapters
Related Toolkits
Community Assessment
Information about how to assess community needs and resources, get issues on the public agenda, and choose relevant strategies.
Chapters
Related Toolkits
Communications to Promote Interest and Participation
Communications that promote interest and encourage involvement.
Chapters
Related Toolkits
Developing a Strategic Plan and Organizational Structure
Information about developing a strategic plan and organizational structure, recruiting and training staff and volunteers, and providing technical assistance.
Chapters
Chapter 9. Developing an Organizational Structure for the Initiative
Chapter 10. Hiring and Training Key Staff of Community Organizations
Related Toolkits
Leadership and Management
Information about the core functions of leadership, management, and group facilitation.
Chapters
Related Toolkits
Analyzing Community Problems and Designing and Adapting Community Interventions
Information about analyzing community problems to design, choose, and adapt interventions for different cultures and communities.
Chapters
Related Toolkits
Implementing Promising Community Interventions
Information on illustrative interventions using various strategies for change.
Chapters
Related Toolkits
Cultural Competence and Spirituality in Community Building
Information on understanding culture and diversity, how to strengthen multicultural collaboration, and spirituality and community building
Chapters
Related Toolkits
Organizing for Effective Advocacy
Information on advocacy principles, advocacy research, providing education, direct action campaigns, media advocacy, and responding to opposition.
Chapters
Related Toolkits
Evaluating Community Programs and Initiatives
Information on developing a plan for evaluation, evaluation methods, and using evaluation to understand and improve the initiative.
Chapters
Chapter 37. Operations in Evaluating Community Interventions
Chapter 38. Some Methods for Evaluating Comprehensive Community Initiatives
Chapter 39. Using Evaluation to Understand and Improve the Initiative
Related Toolkits
Maintaining Quality and Rewarding Accomplishments
Information on achieving and maintaining quality performance, public reporting, providing incentives, and honoring colleagues and community champions.
Chapters
Generating, Managing, and Sustaining Financial Resources
Information on writing grants, preparing an annual budget, and planning for financial sustainability.
Chapters
Related Toolkits
Social Marketing and Sustainability of the Initiative
Information on conducting a social marketing effort (promoting awareness, interest, and behavior change), and planning for long-term sustainability.
Chapters
Related Toolkits
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Integrate their resources
The Community Tool Box publishes their resources under a Creative Commons licence, which means that we can reuse them on Activist Handbook. Focus on the following:
Add links to their resources in our related guides (in the external resources section)
See which guides can be directly copied to our website, and which need more work integrating. Pay attention to difficult language used. And since they have an overwhelming amount of content, make sure to add summaries on top of the article. You might need some help from our moderators organising all the content in the right place on Activist Handbook.
Relevance
The Community Tool Box has 2,948 backlinks. In 2015 (last reported date), they reported to have had 5,871,300 unique website visitors.
Attribution
Work from the following sources was reused on this page:
About the Tool Box by Community Tool Box (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License)
[Community Tool Box](Community Tool Box) by Wikipedia (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0)
