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Community Tool Box

Online library with guides for community activists
6 min read
Last update: Aug 25, 2023
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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

Community Assessment

Information about how to assess community needs and resources, get issues on the public agenda, and choose relevant strategies.

Chapters

Communications to Promote Interest and Participation

Communications that promote interest and encourage involvement.

Chapters

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

Leadership and Management

Information about the core functions of leadership, management, and group facilitation.

Chapters

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

Implementing Promising Community Interventions

Information on illustrative interventions using various strategies for change.

Chapters

Cultural Competence and Spirituality in Community Building

Information on understanding culture and diversity, how to strengthen multicultural collaboration, and spirituality and community building

Chapters

Organizing for Effective Advocacy

Information on advocacy principles, advocacy research, providing education, direct action campaigns, media advocacy, and responding to opposition.

Chapters

Evaluating Community Programs and Initiatives

Information on developing a plan for evaluation, evaluation methods, and using evaluation to understand and improve the initiative.

Chapters

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

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

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  1. Add links to their resources in our related guides (in the external resources section)

  2. 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)

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