Community Leadership Development Resources
Growing Successful Community Gardens
Amanda Beavin, Bethany Pratt and Nicole Breazeale, March 2022.
How do we make community gardens more successful and help them persist through time with less reliance on Extension? This publication identifies five criteria that are important for the long-term success of a community garden: (1) land security; (2) community support; (3) resource mobilization; (4) environmental conditions and garden design; and (5) governance, management, and leadership. Learn more.
Community Leadership Priorities Assessment
Daniel Kahl, July 2020.
Offering a leadership program is a way for a community to develop depth of leadership in community members. A good starting point is to assess the community leadership priorities. The Community Leadership Priorities Assessment allows local individuals, government, business, and organizational representatives to share their priority outcomes for leadership skill development, establishing a solid foundation for aligning leadership program content. Learn more.
Imagine the Implications! Facilitating Mind Mapping to Identify Community Repercussions from a Disruption
Community disruptions are changes in the world that cause us to rethink our community systems and processes. This publication provides step-by-step guidance to Extension Agents or community leaders on how to facilitate a group mapping exercise to identify implications of a community disruption and consider actions for responding to those disruptions. Learn more.
Moving from Listening to Action: A Guide to Facilitating Focus Groups for Community Asset Identification
Dan Kahl and Karen Fawcett, January 2019.
Involving community members to explore their local health environment is an effective way to engage people in discovery of community assets. This publication provides guidance to Extension Agents to facilitate a focus group to explore health assets and organize community members for follow-up health improvement actions. Learn more.
Mapping Local Networks to Reach Stakeholders and Mobilize Resources
Stakeholder mapping is a process of aligning projects or ideas with the people that will be most impacted by it. Connecting to people who could be negatively impacted by the project or issue allows early consideration to change plans with unanticipated consequences or that are not publicly supported. By aligning people or groups that benefit from the effort, the initiative gains resource connections and broader involvement. Learn more.
A Policy, Systems, and Environment Approach to Community Health
Dan Kahl, August 2018. CLD 2-14
The existing policies, systems, and environments that impact community health can be a confusing maze of physical attributes, organizational systems, and rules that govern behavior. This document will help Cooperative Extension agents and health advocates to tease apart the complexity of community living and use a Policy, Systems, and Environment (PSE) approach to identify assets and barriers to community health and explore the importance of engaging community members in the process. Learn more.
A Convener's Guide to Hosting a Public Forum
Daniel Kahl, October 2016. CLD 2-12
This guide is intended to provide support to Cooperative Extension professionals who intend to bring the public together for an issue discussion. It will provide a general overview to help the convener of a public meeting address basic details needed to design and host a meeting. Learn more.