Community Tool Box

The Community Tool Box is an Internet-based resource that contains more than 7,000 pages of practical information for promoting community health and development, and has become widely recognized as a resource for both professionals and grassroots groups engaged in the work of community health and development.

What is the Community Tool Box all about?

Our vision is of people—locally and globally—taking action together to change conditions that affect their lives. The purpose of the Community Tool Box is to build capacity for this work—to make it easier for people to bring about change and improvement in their communities. The Community Tool Box connects people with resources for learning the many skills required for this work and applying this knowledge in diverse cultures and contexts.

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, along with a team of other talented and dedicated contributors. The website has become a global resource for community improvement efforts, and has become widely used as text for courses for students in the following disciplines: public health, community health, social work, community psychology, and nursing.

The website has been generously supported by funds from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Kansas Health Foundation, and is a public service of the University of Kansas.

Supports in multiple languages

With funding support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and with the dedicated support of a team of 75 translators around the world, the Community Tool Box is now fully available in Spanish (all 7,000 pages!) See http://ctb.ku.edu. The Community Tool Box project has received funding for translation and cultural adaptation of the Community Tool Box for Arabic. Trusted partners at the University of Beirut School of Health Sciences and the Arab Resource Collective will make this project reality. The vision is for the Community Tool Box to serve as a “common well” for the work of community health and development, and aspires to work with partners to eventually make resources available in Portuguese, French, Russian, and Chinese.

Community Tool Box Supports

The Community Tool Box directs users to just-in-time access to capacity-building resources. It does so through several featured gateways to the tools. The vast resources of The Community Tool Box are organized by what you may want to do. These include:

Learn a Skill (A Table of Contents links you to nearly 300 Sections that provide training in specific skills of community work.)
Plan the Work (Toolkits outline tasks, examples, supports for 16 core competencies.)
Solve a Problem (“Trouble Shooting Guides” list common challenges in doing this work, questions for analysis, and links to supports.)
Explore Best Processes and Practices (Evidence, examples, and links to tools help you make the case for using promising approaches.)
Connect with Others (Learn from others by asking an advisor, using forums, and links to other online resources.)

The Community Tool Box is intended for everyone interested in building healthier communities, including:

Individual community members
Members of community and non-governmental organizations
Schools and universities
Foundations and grantmakers
State, national, and international agencies

The Community Tool Box team is dedicated to bringing solutions to light. This is done by:

Providing the tools needed to build healthier, strong communities and organizations
Connecting people to each other and to resources for improving change efforts
Partnering to make the site and resources available in multiple languages – e.g. Arabic.

Tool Box sections are written in everyday, friendly language. This practical information includes:

Step-by-step guidelines – what, why, when, and how
Real-life examples
Checklists that summarize their points
PowerPoint slides for training

Institutional Background

The Work Group for Community Health and Development is a research, teaching and service organization established in 1975 and based at the University of Kansas. The Work Group is also designated a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre. Over the past three decades, the Work Group has developed extensive experience in researching, implementing, and evaluating community-based efforts to create environments which reduce risk for substance abuse, adolescent pregnancy and chronic disease and to improve outcomes in health and health equity. Indeed, our mission is reflected in the tools we develop—to foster conditions that promote healthy and sustainable communities. Because of our work building capacity for community health and development work and our participatory research to extend the evidence base for community efforts to promote health and development, we have been designated at as World Health Collaborating Centre since 2004.

External links