Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.

Web Resources

• Appreciative Inquiry Commons—http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu. A good general source of infor­mation on using appreciative inquiry.
• The Aspen Institute Policy Programs—www.aspeninstitute.org. The Aspen Institute has a website that describes various issues about measuring community capacity. The institute also has a workbook titled Measuring Community Capacity Building: A Workbook in Progress, which is very useful.
• Axelrod Group—www.axelrodgroup.com. This site provides information regarding the Conference model (an approach that includes the use of Future Search) and follow-up conferences designed to help in the development of an action plan.
• Future Search—www.futuresearch.net. This website provides information on Future Search, an orga­nizational development technique of collaborative inquiry that focuses on the future of an organization, a network of people, or a community.
• International Association for Public Participation (IAP2)—www.iap2.org. This organization helps people around the world, including communities, to improve their decisions by involving those people who are affected by those decisions. It provides many public participation tools.
• Taos Institute—http://www.taosinstitute.net. The Taos Institute is an excellent resource for materials and training in the area of appreciative inquiry.

Sites for Data and Tools

• American Factfinder—factfinder2.census.gov. This is the richest source of data for communi­ties. The U.S. Census Bureau provides detailed household data that can be examined at several different levels of geography. In addition to the decennial census, this site provides access to the American Community Survey, Economic Censuses, and population estimates for communities.
• Community Action Partnership—http://www.communityactioncna.org. This website has an avail­able online tool called the Comprehensive Community Needs Assessment (CCNA). The tool is free and provides selected basic information for an area, including demographic, education, employment, housing, income, health care, and nutrition.
• Community Development Practice—http://www.comm-dev.org/publications/cd-practice. This web­site, sponsored by the Community Development Society, provides innovative tools and tech­niques that can be used by practitioners.
• Community Economic Toolbox—www.economictoolbox.geog.psu.edu. For a good source of economic data, the Community Economic Toolbox provides some important indicators of economic change. In addition to economic snapshots, this website supplies communities with basic economic tools, such as location quotients and shift share analyses.
• Community Toolbox—http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents. This website offers 46 chapters of step-by-step guidance on community-building skills. The toolbox includes chapters on community assessment, strategic and action planning, and leadership, among others.
• Green Communities Toolkit: Environmental Protection Agency—http://www.epa.gov/greenkit/tools3.htm. This website provides details on the processes used in a wide variety of communities and the outcomes that have been achieved in these cases.
• Headwater Economics—http://www.headwaterseconomics.org/eps. This source provides some unique data analyses for a variety of geographic areas.
• Scenario Planning Tools—http://scenarioplanningtools.org. Fosters development and application of scenario planning tools.
• Social Explorer—http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/maps/home.aspx. Provides demographic infor­mation in an easily understood format: data maps. They have created hundreds of interactive data maps of the United States.