The National Night Out website. From the About page: NNO is designed to Heighten crime and drug prevention awareness; Generate support for, and participation in, local anticrime programs; Strengthen neighborhood spirit and police-community partnerships; and Send a message to criminals letting them know that neighborhoods are organized and fighting back. “Last year’s National Night Out campaign involved citizens, law enforcement agencies, civic groups, businesses, neighborhood organizations and local officials from over 15,000 communities from all 50 states, U.S. territories, Canadian cities and military bases worldwide. In all, over 36 million people participated.”

Click here for National Night Out Party Ideas. Excerpts:

• Serve food, but keep it simple: Watermelon, Lemonade, Coffee, tea and dessert, Ice cream cones, Pretzels and chips, Fruit and cheese plates, Pizza, Cookies, Hamburgers, Hot dogs, Corn on the cob, Salads.
• Facilitate conversations: Design a mixer: “Find a person who…” – with prizes, Block history stories, National Night Out stories, Photos from past block parties and NNO events, Oldest resident award, Longest resident award, Newest resident award.
• Do something for the community: Collect for a food bank, Beautify a common area, Plan a fall clean-up or bulb planting, Recruit additional Neighborhood Watch leaders and block captains, Discuss neighborhood problems & opportunities, Distribute neighborhood block list.
• Have fun: Bike parade, Board games, Skits, Make a mural or banner, Coloring Contest, Pony rides, 3-legged race, Football, baseball, basketball, street hockey, Roller blade, Youth parade with a theme, Jump rope, Chalk art, Face painting, Bubbles, Sack races, Magic show, Sing-alongs, Water balloons, Frisbee competition, Piñata, Clowns, Bike Safety, Child ID Kits, Block party, Cookout, Parade, Jump rope contest, Hula hoop contest, Barbecue, Street dance, Volleyball, Storytelling (truth or fiction), Celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, Scavenger hunt, Take lots of pictures, Karaoke, Rummage sale, Music and DJ, Dunk tank, Movies, Sandy beach party, Street carnival, Disposable camera distribution/photo contest, Self-defense demonstration, Jail & Bail, K-9 demonstration, Funniest hat contest, Welcome new neighbors, Live music, Horseshoes

There’s always something: Read the Trademark Fact Sheet (“Violators will be subject to legal action”). For instance, if your group needs to raise funds for your NNO, and you want to hit up a local business, you need to let it know that it “may not have its participation/association with NNO publicly advertised, displayed or promoted, unless it is registered as an official NNO sponsor with NATW’s national office, or unless NATW extends advance written approval.”

Other resources:

• Find a law agency or Neighborhood Watch Group near you – search form from the National Sheriff’s Association Neighborhood Watch Program
• Block parties – a rollup of block party ideas and resources
• National Night Out Block Party Guide (pdf) – from the City of Oakland CA Police Department, widely reproduced by other jurisdictions
• National Night Out Planning Guide (pdf) – four pages for useful tips and forms that the city of Palo Alto produced for last year’s events.
• Block Party Planning Tips from Block Party NYC
• Plan a Street Party from Streets Alive
• Ideas for Block Activities – from Jim Diers (author of Neighbor Power), Ashoka Fellow Steven Clift, and members of e-democracy.org
• Icebreakers & games for community building
• An account from one of the NNO award winners – City of Coppell TX
• US Department of Justice case study on NNO (pdf) – from the Practitioner Perspectives bulletin
• Building from National Night Out by Networking Neighbors Online – from PBS Idea Lab, suggestions on how to keep the community going even after NNO

Have you organized NNO activities in the past? We’re helping organize some communities around NNO this year, and hope you can help by sharing stories, tips, do’s and don’ts. Particularly interested in how you kept the community going after NNO. – Thanks

The Young Foundation/Community action toolkit – There are already hundreds of places around the country where local authorities are working to empower and support communities, and where communities are taking the lead on local issues: running community buildings, setting up action groups, delivering local services and championing the need for better public services. However, there are as many places just starting to explore how to engage and empower local people.

This is challenging for many local authorities and public agencies. Devolution and empowerment create new risks for local authorities to manage and demand that agencies change the way they view and work with communities and service users.

Much is already known about how to successfully empower communities. This community action toolkit brings together knowledge, practical tools and stories about community empowerment for organisations who want to shift power and influence to local people and for communities that want to take up those opportunities. It is based on five years’ work the Young Foundation has undertaken with communities, local groups, councillors, local authorities, housing associations, public agencies and central government.

Learning Locally: What can three community initiatives teach us about promoting localism in Devon, by Carmel O’Sullivan, Catherine Russell, Vicki Sellick – This short report explores the lessons from three very different approaches to community engagement in Devon – a grass roots community forum, a parish council cluster and a community plan for an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. We explore the impact each structure has had on community engagement, scrutiny of local services and promoting resident responsibility.

Growing social ventures by Cynthia Shanmugalingam, Geoff Mulgan, Jack Graham, Simon Tucker – Britain’s history is full of examples of forward-thinking co-ops, charities, mutuals as well as profitable businesses that have pioneered innovative ways to tackle social needs. From the rich activity of socially oriented businesses and charities in the 19th century, to forerunners of the ethical business movement like the Body Shop, and an estimated £24bn social enterprise industry, the UK has a diverse ecology of entrepreneurial activity aimed at meeting social goals.

With strong government support and interest in the field, and growing interest from London’s financial services sector, the UK has come to be seen as a global leader in the emerging fields of social enterprise, social finance and social entrepreneurship. Over the past fifteen years, at least £350 million of public money has gone into funds for social entrepreneurship, charity capacity building and other support for social ventures, alongside significant philanthropic funding and some private investment – although accurate aggregate figures remain elusive. Tax incentives have also been introduced, as well as legal reforms to encourage investment.

A new industry is steadily taking shape. This industry has many names: social investment, social finance, and the social economy. It fuses together two relative strengths of the UK – skill in finance and skill in civic action, organisation and delivery.

This report, produced by the Young Foundation and published by NESTA, is the first comprehensive survey of the state of the institutions that support a dynamic and emerging sector of social ventures.

More on the Young Foundation’s work.

We created a page to list those resources that were recommended to us by these friends of Our Blocks who helped us prepare for the “Someone’s Done That Already: the Best Practice of Using Best Practices” session of the Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp on Empowering Communities.

Thanks again to Kevin Harris, Richard Layman, Diane Dyson, Matt Singh, Christina Holt, Colin Gallagher, Lisa Palmer, Julian Dobson, Kevin Harris again, Mat Dryhurst, David Crowley, Barbara Pantuso, Paul Lamb, Rebecca Sanborn Stone, and Brian Fier.

Click on the image to see the full Recommended Resources page.

Brian Fier is involved in community building and development. He is interested in information dissemination, collaboration, and improving communities. Additionally, he is developing tools for connecting people to each other and to information with the intention of helping improve communities and people’s lives. One such project is Campus Dakota (@CampusDakota) where he is the President and Community Developer. Brian has a master’s and bachelor’s degree from North Dakota State University; his coursework was focused on the social sciences. He is also a Firefighter and Paramedic Specialist with Bettendorf Fire Rescue, and Flotilla Staff Officer in the US Coast Guard Auxiliary.

[Brian is the latest Blockhead to sign up to run this site, and this is his first post. Welcome aboard, Officer Fier. - Eds]

Do you want to bring people together to make things better, but don’t know how to go about it? The Community Tool Box offers detailed resources related to creating and maintaining coalitions and partnerships. The resource is divided into the six areas listed below. Each section provides easy to follow information and tools for getting started on tackling an issue.

Outline for Creating and Maintaining Coalitions and Partnerships

This section provides a broad overview on creating and maintaining coalitions and partnerships. It provides questions to consider, steps to take, ideas to ponder, and more. If you do not know where to start, start with this section and continue from there.

Outline with links to tools

Expanding beyond the outline from the previous section, this section provides many links to other resources that will help you consider different things as you work to build and maintain coalitions and partnerships.

How-to Information on Creating and Maintaining Coalitions and Partnerships

If you are looking for a direct how-to this is the place for you.

Examples of Creating and Maintaining Coalitions and Partnerships

Take a look at the following four examples of how real people and organizations went about building and maintaining coalitions and partnerships:

• Unemployment and The North Quabbin Community Coalition
• EQUAL Members Collaborate for Long-Term Community Change
• Project Example: AbilityLinks Increases Employment for People with Disabilities
• Conferences Unite Communities to Raise Women’s Awareness of Smoking Risks

Quick Tips and Tools for doing this work

Do you want some quick tips and tools? Check out:

• Quick Tips: Defining Your Coalition’s Membership
• Tool: Including Diverse Participants
• Quick Tips: Principles for Coalition Success.

Links to other online resources for Creating and Maintaining Coalitions and Partnerships

Want more resources? Check out these links.

Rebecca Sanborn Stone is Senior Associate for Communications at Orton Family Foundation and CommunityMatters. She holds a BA in Biology and English from Williams College, where she helped found the Williams Social Choice Fund for socially responsible investing. She got her MESc from Yale. You can also find Rebecca on Twitter (@rsstone) and Facebook.

On the practice of hoarding or sharing best practices, Rebecca says: I’ve historically seen a fair bit of hoarding, including in my own organization, though not always intentionally. I think a lot of organizations intend to share and collaborate and grow a common set of best practices, but it breaks down because we all want control over what our case studies and resources look like, how we build and share them. I think I see a shift in that trend, though – I’ve recently learned of a number of newer organizations (mostly either run by millennials or at least operating with a millennial mindset) that are bucking this trend and abandoning the ego in favor of true collaboration. It makes organizations like mine stop and take notice and, I hope, will be enough to help us change our ways.

These are Rebecca’s recommended resources:

Changemakers Competitions – Community empowerment for me always starts with inspiration and examples, and I can’t think of a better resource for that than Changemakers. Their competition winners offer so many inspiring stories of people taking control of their communities and coming up with innovative solutions to both local and global challenges. The competition entrants who don’t win are perhaps an even richer resource – the site doubles as a database of creative ideas for community change.

CommunityMatters blog – CommunityMatters helps local leaders and changemakers find collaborative, innovative grassroots solutions to community challenges. The CommunityMatters blog includes information-rich posts and podcasts of conference calls on topics ranging from local foods to placemaking to economic development.

NCDD Resource Center – The NCDD Resource Center is home to more than 2,500 resources for dialogue and deliberation, including dialogue guides, case studies, tools, and evaluation methods. Dialogue and democratic participation are at the heart of all community empowerment, and NCDD is at the heart of this movement.

Cause Communications Toolkit – Cause Communications publishes a Non-profit Communications Toolkit, as well as other resources related to networks, online outreach tools, and print and presentation design. It might seem only peripherally related to community empowerment, but we find that so many community initiatives stall because they fail to communicate with or reach citizens. The Cause Communications guides are some of the best resources around for improving effectiveness in communications.

Deep Economy (Bill McKibben) – It’s not free, and not an obvious choice, but I have to list it. I see so many aspects of community empowerment leading back to the “local” movement today – buy local / grow local / eat local / work local / etc. Bill McKibben’s book was at the forefront of the local movement, and is one of the best articulation’s I’ve seen for why local economies and community empowerment have to go hand in hand. [Check a library near you]

Building community in neighborhoods

The following resources on Rebecca’s list are more focused on building community in neighborhoods. As Rebecca notes: There are several great databases and resources out there with examples of community initiatives, and instructions on how to do it, but I wouldn’t limit myself to the neighborhood level. Lessons from small town and rural planning would apply very well to neighborhood community building, and the resources I’d recommend would point people in that direction.

CommunityPlanning.net – The Community Planning Handbook by Nick Wates is one of the best publications, with ideas for planning-related tools to engage citizens, identify what matters to communities, and plan for the future – especially in an international context. Communityplanning.net is a free online database listing most of the resources from his book.

Planning Tool Exchange – The Planning Tool Exchange is an online hub for tools, resources, and organizations in community planning and civic engagement. We invite all users to find and contribute resources and help grow an information bank for communities.

Heart & Soul Community Planning Handbook – The Heart & Soul Community Planning Handbook helps communities engage citizens and take control of their future. Chapters include network analysis and stakeholder identification, outreach and communications, storytelling, and engaging youth. I recommend this because it’s at the heart of our work and it’s one of the resources I know best; neighborhoods looking to engage citizens would learn a lot from the small town planning examples included here.

Animating Democracy database – This database focuses on projects that use the arts to build dialogue, engage citizens, and work through difficult civic issues. Many of the projects are replicable, but even if they’re not a perfect fit for other communities and neighborhoods, they inspire creative thinking about unorthodox community tools.

PPS Placemaking 101 Articles – PPS’s resource collection includes how-tos, articles, principles, tools, and just about everything else a community would need to understand how placemaking can help and how to get started.

Paul Lamb is Principal at Man on A Mission Consulting, a firm specializing in “Management Consulting for Social Change.” He is an author and social entrepreneur, and runs a “Technology & Spiritual Practice” program assisting faith based communities to leverage social media and emerging technology tools. Paul is the co-author with wife Debbie of the Be A Better Partner Handbook for Couples. In a previous life he worked as a nonprofit executive and youth counselor. Paul compiled this comprehensive list of Social Enterprise Resources on ZeroDivide, which includes most everything you’d need to start and sustain a social enterprise. He also authored this Social Enterprise 101 presentation for budding social entrepreneurs:

Paul recommends that you check these other resources out:

Social Enterprise Alliance - Website of the Social Enterprise Alliance – the largest membership org for nonprofit social enterprise in the US.

Social Entrepreneur, Social Enterprise and Social Innovation Sources of Funding - A list of 200+ social entrepreneur, social enterprise and social innovation funding sources on Ned, global online co-working space for early stage social entrepreneurs and collaborative social ventures.

130 Ways to Fund Your Social Venture, published in SocialEarth, a collaborative blog that focuses on businesses that are doing good through their work.

On sharing/hoarding best practices, Paul says: “Sharing is in, hoarding is out. Coopetition is in, competition is out!”

Next up: Rebecca Sanborn Stone of the Orton Family Foundation and CommunityMatters.

published 05.18.11 by Shareable

Subscribe to Kelly’s blog, thekelword, and to the Shareable rss feed. See more links below.

The John Lennon tribute in Central Park’s Strawberry Fields. Credit: Kerry Kehoe.

There’s a movement – or two, or many – under foot. It goes by myriad names and comes in an array colors. The common thread, though, involves citizens stepping up to better their surroundings, to create safer, more livable, and more environmentally sound urban environments. According to the folks at Pattern Cities, some popular monikers include “guerilla urbanism,” “pop-up urbanism,” “new urbanism,” “changescaping,” or “D.I.Y. urbanism.” They, however, prefer the “tactical urbanism” approach which is defined with five specific criteria:

• A deliberate, phased approach to instigating change;
• The offering of local solutions for local planning challenges;
• Short-term commitment and realistic expectations;
• Low-risks, with a possibly a high reward; and
• The development of social capital between citizens and the building of organizational capacity between public-private institutions, non-profits, and their constituents.

Such a strategy employs an incremental approach in order to test real-world solutions to real-world problems in the urban environment. Like any good incubator project, small-scale experimentation demands fewer resources, be they time, funds, or man hours. The hope here is that positive results are scalable. The definition of true tactical urbanism hinges on the institutional involvement and long-term vision.

In contrast, so-called D.I.Y. or guerilla urbanism affects temporary change in a more localized setting and is instigated from the bottom up without, necessarily, an eye toward the bigger picture. These actions amount to social interventions in the name of bettering a community or furthering a cause.

In a shareable world, there is room for both of these divergent, albeit similar, strategies, and everything in between. Indeed, intiatives from many camps are proving successful in cities around the world. Here at Shareable, we’ve written numerous guides for shaping your urban environment and community. Below are our readers’ favorite ideas.

How to Be an Urban Change Agent

A good first step to begin your urban experiments is to start a neighborhood work group to get your community’s support, input, and resources from which to draw. After that, the sky is really the limit for what a group of committed people can do.

Make Your Local Streets Car-free.

Like the test case in New York City, pilot projects for car-free streets are cropping up all over, from Portland to Brussels. Temporary trials often immediately show improved safety and efficiency statistics with the long-term gains including improved health and social interactions among the neighbors.

Design Family-friendly Transit Systems.

In Portland, family-friendly transit modes are a hot topic of discussion and evaluation. From obstructive designs to unsafe crowds, public transportation systems generally fail to consider the little people.

A small child rides the subway in New York City. Photo credit: Kerry Kehoe.

Launch a Farmer’s Market.

In San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood, residents came together in the wake of losing their Real Food organic grocery. Their response to a lack of access to organic produce was to start their own farmers’ market.

Start a Seed-lending Library.

Another Bay Area food-related project is Richmond Grows, a seed lending library that supports community members interested in urban agriculture. Taking it a step further, the organization lends their wisdom to other groups looking to set up seed libraries.

Plant a Community Garden.

Of course, community gardens are the next logical step and San Francisco projects provide great guidance on that, as well. Whether it yields food, play space, or quietude, open-space gardens in the midst of urbanity are vital.

Start a Nature Group or Educational Program for kids.

As municipal governments attempt to balance budgets, cuts are often made to educational programs that are, in fact, critical to the well-being and development of children. Some parents aren’t taking it lying down; they are creating their own models.

Start a Really Really Free Market or Community Swap Meet.

Similar, but different, to the farmers’ market protocol is the setting up of a place where community members can freely barter and trade their goods and services.

Build a Waterpod.

Self-described as “a floating eco-habitat that will study self-sufficient, water-based living,” Waterpods utilize scrap building materials to fashion ecologically and structurally sound barges. These folks are getting ahead of the curve when it comes escaping the crowded urban environs.

An ode to the glory days of bicycles that is now being revisited. Photo credit: Kerry Kehoe.

Designate a Bike Corridor.

As urban populations boom, transportation is ever the growing concern in most cities and bikes are an obvious, implementable fix. In Los Angeles, neighborhood councils, business owners, activist groups, and government officials are all putting their heads together on this one in hopes of eventually altering the nightmarish tangle of traffic that is the City of Angels.

Start a Peer-to-peer Car-sharing Program.

While Zipcar and other car-sharing programs boom across the globe, some car owners are taking matters into their own hands by setting up peer-to-peer systems in their neighborhoods informally or by using services like Relay Rides or Getaround, which offer specialized technology and insurance to help people safely and easily rent their cars to neighbors and vice versa.

Start a Carpool.

The older cousin of car sharing, carpooling has long been the way for commuters to go. The strangers you ride with today will be your friends tomorrow.

The scope of projects that can be accomplished by community members with a bit of vision and cooperation is fairly remarkable. When facing the myriad issues currently on our collective stoop, this brand of strategical engagement in small, concentrated efforts to better the greater good is imperative. The words of Margaret Mead ring particularly true when it comes to both tactical and D.I.Y. urbanism: “Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Recent articles by Kelly McCartney in Shareable (rss):

A: The civic economy is being built by protagonists who are led by passion, purpose, and personal commitment – and whose key asset is their social networks and trust they hold.

click on any image to enlarge

B: The civic economy is based upon inviting participation from the public at large – which goes far beyond mere consultation, to create frameworks for a type of co-production and co-investment that builds deep democratic belonging.

C: The civic economy is built using an increasing diversity of finance sources as well as the investment of a range of other ‘currencies’ – people’s time, trust, and social networks.

D: The civic economy is emerging from recognizing and re-combining the latent capacity of dormant or under-used physical assets, human capabilities, and aspirations.

E: The civic economy is focused on generating a holistic experience of place – creating places that tell stories about their purpose, often surprising and delighting users and helping to generate open conditions for people’s participation and collaboration.

F: The civic economy, although purpose driven, is being built not through strategic planning, but through open-ended, agile, incremental, and interactive practices – based on starting small, and growing in response to evolving needs and opportunities.

G: The civic economy is not just deeply local, but also intricately linked to change-makers elsewhere – growing through networks and adaptation, rather than through replication.

H: The civic economy is based on delivering a plurality of values and outcomes – which need to be acknowledged and taken into account in formulating the objectives and metrics of new policy, projects, and procurement.

Read the story behind the book in civiceconomy.net, and this review by Kevin Harris.

A slidedeck of illustrations used here:

Barbara Pantuso (@barbarapantuso) is Founder and CEO of Hey, Neighbor!, a location-based website and mobile app that connects neighbors, and creates a new marketplace for neighborly sharing of “MicroFavors”. Rachel Botsman called it “a great example of how technology creates both the efficiency and the social glue for trust to form between strangers”. Barbara follows many blogs and articles that focus on community building and improving neighborhoods. Many of the resources she shares below are about how & why neighbors connect. Topics include the social, safety, government, civic, public space, and environmental aspects of a community.

Yes! Magazine – Search for keyword “Neighborhood“. Many great articles and real world examples of neighborhood building stories. Also practical “how to” tips. Like their tagline says “Powerful ideas, practical actions”

Citizens Handbook - Practical Assistance for Those Who Want to Make  a Difference – An online handbook  published by the Vancouver Community Network (VCN), a non-profit Internet service provider that provides free services to assist individuals, community groups and non-profit organizations in accessing and utilizing the Internet to its fullest ability.

Hey, Neighbor! - Hey, Neighbor! is a network for trusted neighbor connections and collaboration. It’s like a local Facebook meets a safer Craigslist for your neighborhood.

Many people still don’t know their neighbors. But now more than ever, people want a sense of community. For many, a knock on the door can be inconvenient or intimidating. That’s where Hey, Neighbor! comes in. It provides a virtual knock on the door and a simple way for neighbors to exchange favors, information, goods and services.

Hey, Neighbor! challenges the notion that “good fences make good neighbors.” By reaching across the virtual fence, Hey, Neighbor! connects neighbors in ways that helps them feel happier and more secure, and that helps neighborhoods thrive.

Michael Wood-Lewis/Ghost of Midnight – Great Blog by the Founder of Front Porch Forum in VT – a well used site and leader in online neighbor networks.

Kevin Harris/Neighbourhoods – UK Blog about neighborhoods – very active blogger. Lots of great real-world examples and stories.

Next up: Paul Lamb

We’re gobsmacked by how much we’d already learned through this three-week experiment:

1. There’s A BUNCH (technical term) of great stuff out there that we didn’t even know existed. And to think we thought we’d been paying attention.
2. When you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s good to seek help from people who do.
3. Good people who know stuff will share stuff they know.
4. When people we trust give us advice, we pay attention.

So we’ve decided to take this experiment a little bit further. We’ve asked our friends to ask their friends. And we’re asking you, dear reader (Hi Mom!):

If someone came up to you and said: “I’d like to throw a block party (or launch a local website, or build a community garden, or start a social enterprise, or improve safety, or make an asset map, or whatever) what are the best 3 to 5 resources I should check out?”

What would you say?

To make it easier for you to make recommendations (and for us to publish them), we’ve developed this simple form (see the image below; you can either read it sideways, or click on it to go to the survey).

Thanks!

Next up: Kevin Harris of Neighbourhoods