Community Tool Box Update

Posted by on September 17, 2004

A number of Co-List readers may be familiar with the Community Tool Box (Web address = http://ctb.ku.edu), a Web site devoted to providing information and practical guidance about community health and development. This brief note is to update you on our progress, to outline our next steps, and to invite your comments and suggestions.

The Community Tool Box, launched in 1994, features self-contained instructional sections on more than 270 community topics, ranging from conducting focus groups to creating business plans, and from choosing evaluation measures to doing electronic advocacy. Each section offers detailed, nontechnical, user-friendly, how-to information for those doing and supporting community work. Some additional Tool Box features include 16 detailed curriculum modules, an equal number of work stations (tool kits) on core community competencies, checklists, a trouble-shooting guide, and an on-line newsletter.

With over 6000 pages of text and growing, we believe we may presently be the largest single source of community health and development information now in existence. If you?ve not visited the site, or not been there recently, we warmly invite you to check it out and use it.

As we continue our work, we hope to branch out in new directions. These include development of multiple sections on spirituality and the arts; increasing our interactive capabilities; and translating the Tool Box into other languages. (A basic Spanish version is already on-line.) We are especially motivated to extend our global reach ? to help build civic capacity in developing countries -and also to partner with domestic organizations in creating customized Tool Boxes and other customized electronic content for advancing their own efforts.

We can?t achieve these goals all by ourselves; nor do we wish to. Specifically, we are interested in partnering with others, in combining our mutual skills for common domestic or global goals. If you belong to an organization with potential interest in working together with us, or know of one that may be, or if you have comments, suggestions, or leads relating to support for these areas, we would be very pleased to hear from you. Inquiries and responses can be directed to me, at Bill_Berkowitz@uml.edu.

Bill Berkowitz
Department of Psychology
University of Massachusetts Lowell

for the Community Tool Box team