TNC Community Development Renewal Initiative

TNC CD-Renewal Reports & "2 Pagers" | CD Web Links | CD-Funding | Other CD Resources

TNC CD Renewal Reports

• TNC CD-Renewal Initiative 2006-08: Final Report
  Executive Summary
  this report reviews the activities of the 2-year TNC CD-Renewal initiative, highlights key impacts and suggests future directions and challenges for this work.
  

"2 Pagers" TNC CD-Renewal promising practices and approaches to supporting agency-based CD work

A) Building Agency Understanding of CD

• Defining Community Development
  The TNC's "working definition" of CD and examples of Agency-based CD activities
• Developing a shared understanding of CD
  Various strategies for generating a shared understanding of community development within an organization.
• Assessing Community Development in your Agency
  How agency assessments can support organizational changes for community development.
• Learning Circles and Agency Change
  How learning circles can be used to support agency staff to examine the context of their work in ways that promote positive organizational and community change.

B) Linking Program and Service Delivery to CD Action

• Understanding Members as "Constituents"
  How agencies can rethink the role of program participants as members and "constituents".
• Community Agencies as Good CD Partners
  Exploring diverse strategies for organizations to connect individualized services to group discussion, learning and action.
• Sustaining a Blended CD/Service-Delivery Model
  Strategies used by Neighbourhood Centres and others agencies to promote models integrating service delivery and community development work.
• Boards of Directors and CD
  Ways that the Board of Directors can actively encourage community development.

C) Identifying Community Assets and Challenges

• Using Community "Sweeps"
  Ways to mobilize staff, volunteers and placement students to connect with community members and identify community issues.
• Using needs assessments to support community mobilization and action
  How community research and assessment processes can engage community leaders and groups, and seed new collaborative forums to sustain community development work.

D) Building CD Capacity of Individuals

• Applying Leadership Training to CD
  Ways that peer leadership training can contribute to community development.
• Reframing Volunteer Coordination as CD process
  Strategies to approach volunteer mobilization as a community development process.

E) CD Strategies in Action

• Partnering with Community Organizers
  How community agencies can work effectively with community organizing groups to advance social change.
• Mobilizing Student Placements for CD
  Strategies to connect student placements with local community groups to address systemic issues.
• Community Building through Gardening
  Using community gardens as a strategy for facilitating connections with residents who rarely interact.

CD Web Links

• Toronto Community Development Institute
  www.torontocdi.ca
  
  A collaborative initiative of Toronto cd-practitioners aimed at expanding opportunities for connecting, learning together, and enhancing CD capacity in communities. The 2008 Spring Institute supported over 600 people to share their expertise and vision for moving forward. A 2009 event is currently being planned for April 23-25 at George Borwn College
  
  
• Building Movement Project
  www.buildingmovement.org
  
  Launched in the summer of 2000, the Building Movement Project was developed in response to the many factors that have constrained the growth and efficacy of nonprofit organizations engaged in social change. These include an increasingly anti-progressive shift in US politics and in the nonprofit sector, the growing public assault on low-income and marginalized populations in the US, the loss of movement building strategies in organizations that have professionalized and/or been forced to focus on their own survival, and the lack of analysis and frameworks that helps groups place their work within a movement building context.
  
  
• Theory of Change Tools
  www.theoryofchange.org
  
  What is Theory of Change and why should I care? A Theory of Change is an innovative tool to design and evaluate social change initiatives. By creating a blueprint of the building blocks required to achieve a social change initiative’s long-term goal, such as improving a neighborhood’s literacy levels or academic achievement, a Theory of Change offers a clear roadmap to achieve your results identifying the preconditions, pathways and interventions necessary for an initiative’s success.
  
  
• (and more suggestions?)

CD-Funding Opportunities in Toronto

• George Cedric Metcalf Foundation
  Communities in Action Program
  http://www.metcalffoundation.com
  
  
• Toronto Arts Council
  Community Arts grants and residencies
  www.torontoartscouncil.org
  
  
• United Way of Greater Toronto
  - Action for Neighbourhood Change
  - Community Development Planning Grants
  www.uwgt.org
  
  
• (and more suggestions?)

Other Tools & Publications

• Conflict Resolution Service at St. Stephen's
  www.ststephenshouse.com/crs.shtml
  
  For 20 years the Conflict Resolution Service at St. Stephen’s Community House has been contributing to community development by improving relationships between people and between and within organizations. We give people the capacity to work together more effectively, understand each other better, celebrate diversity and “walk the talk” of empowerment and inclusion. We do interpersonal and multi-party mediation, facilitation and team-building, and training in effective communication and conflict resolution. We run a regular schedule of affordable workshops, and offer custom services to meet specific needs. Our trainers and mediators among the best in the field, and are broadly representative of the many communities we serve. For more information contact us at www.ststephenshouse.com/crs.shtml or 416.925.2103 ext. 249
  
  
• (more suggestions please - what tools and services have you actually used and found helpful?)