Resource Library
Discover Innovative Community Action Initiatives at Community Action Showcase!
The Center of Excellence is a national training hub, engaging Community Action Agencies coast-to-coast to share innovative, high impact strategies. This platform shines a light on Community Action success stories to inspire. Here you can access resources to strengthen services, build community outcomes, and create family and community change in your local area.
Leveraging Partnerships in COVID-19 Response & Recovery
This brief highlights practices that local CAAs can engage in to establish new partnerships or collaborative relationships and describes some of the learnings from Capstone Community Action as they convened resources to assist families in crisis.
What is Human Capacity & Community Transformation?
Join the Partnership’s Human Capacity & Community Transformation Center of Excellence (HCCT COE) to learn about this three year, network-wide effort to identify and highlight Community Action’s top initiatives that build human capacity and transform local communities. Aaron Wicks, VP Organizational Capacity Building discusses what you need to know and how to be involved.
Centering Racial Equity in Housing Needs with the National Alliance to End Homelessness
The NAEH provided an overview of housing needs with the COVID-19 framework and discussed why race equity is at the center of responses and steps that programs and localities can be taking into account to move toward a more equitable response to homelessness and housing needs, including access to resources, attention to outcomes, understanding of contributing factors.
Community Level Impact: El Centro de la Raza’s Housing and Commercial Development Project
The Plaza Roberto Maestas Affordable Housing development project highlights an integrated approach to housing, land use, environmental planning, public transportation, community infrastructure, and aligned workforce opportunities. The project consists of 112 apartments in two buildings for low-income residents, a 7-classroom expansion of El Centro’s award-winning José Martí Child Development Center, a new community cultural center, office space and neighborhood retail/restaurant space. Anchoring the project is a 10,000 square foot central plaza for residents and the greater Beacon Hill community to enjoy that celebrates Latino history.
Food as Medicine – Partnering to Improve Food Security and Health Outcomes among Vulnerable Populations
A county without poverty – thriving, resilient, and prosperous communities for ALL. This is what ALL IN envisions in its efforts to eradicate poverty in Alameda County, California. Through collaboration across a variety of partnerships and innovation, ALL IN seeks to ensure that all families are able to:
– Meet their basic needs for food, shelter, healthcare, and safety
– Earn an income that allows for self-sufficiency and asset building
– Obtain a quality education that positions the next generation for academic and economic success
Since 2014, ALL IN has launched strategies addressing school readiness and food security (food recovery and food as medicine), zeroing in on implementing these strategies at the neighborhood level to ensure that they are reflective and responsive of the community’s needs.
Evaluating Whole Family Approach Pilots: Metropolitan Action Commission 2Gen Evaluation Report
The Metropolitan Action Commission is partnering with families to achieve their goals of getting out of poverty through a Two-Generation/Whole Family approach. MAC’s initiative provides short-term and high-yield job trainings aimed to help Head Start/ Early Head Start parents move toward attaining living-wage jobs. This type of opportunity creates a pathway out of poverty for many families. The results are also correlated to child outcomes for those children whose parents participate in our 2 GEN initiatives.
Dr. Cynthia Croom, Executive Director of Metro Action, presents the results of MAC’s three-year 2Gen/Whole Family pilot, which includes participant and stakeholder experiences and outcomes as well as lessons learned by the agency. In addition to the presentation, three Head Start/Early Head Start parents from the last cohort, who are currently working in full-time internship positions, and leaders from two of the partnering agencies discuss their experiences.
Community Action and AmeriCorps VISTA Insights on How You Can Best Utilize This Resource
Abby Hanks of the Virginia State Office on Volunteerism and Community Services and Lil Dupree of the Partnership speak about AmeriCorps VISTA, its long history with Community Action, and how to get started using this incredible resource.
Creative Approaches to Rural Transportation
Robin Phillips, Executive Director of the National Rural Transit Assistance Program shares her extensive experience in designing, developing, and maintaining rural transportation systems. While highlighting successful programs, including Community Action programs, we look at the critical components of comprehensive planning and funding development.
Solar Power in Rural Communities
The webinar discusses how Community Action can leverage solar energy to maximize impact in rural communities.
Healing is the Revolution: Why Trauma Work is Equity Work
This webinar features Dr. Dense Shervington who illustrates the effects of structural oppression, societal disfranchisement on communities of color and discusses the importance of trauma-informed care for this population, providing insight on how community-based organizations can work to help create steps and opportunity for healing on the individual, family, and community level.
Re-entry Programs: Three Successful Approaches
In this webinar three Community Action leaders share their successful models for helping returning citizens integrate back into communities. The discussion will highlight integrative models, utilizing community partners and successful approaches as best practices.
Why Should Nurses Know About Social Determinants of Health?
Nurses have the ability to address social determinants of health in patients and refer those with health barriers to resources. Doing so can have a long-term impact on patient health.
Dotte Agency: A Participatory Design Model for Community Health
As community activists resist racial injustice, food insecurity, and infrastructural delinquency, many groups are attempting to articulate the voice of the citizen. It is within this landscape that architects have historically struggled to find common ground to afford democratic access for citizens to engage in discussions about the future of their city. Based upon surrogate models of other professions, there has emerged a proactive movement towards Social Impact Design. Like many urban core areas, our community faces a health epidemic compounded by poverty. In response to requests for collaboration, and through cross-disciplinary academic partnerships in both public health and social welfare, we have begun to leverage design advocacy to improve health outcomes. This has evolved into an alternative model of practice that advances public design through interdisciplinary, adaptive and incremental spatial agency. It is a sustainable practice that fosters conversations and supports events originating from within the community. Our approach seeks to scaffold an infrastructure of public health through methods of participatory design and advocacy. Through new forms of design intelligence and collaborative design tools, our critical spatial practice demonstrates new ways for how architectural design can be relevant to society.
Human-Centered Design: Bringing humanity into the built environment
With my experience entrenched in the built environment, I came to Greater Good Studio (GGS) curious to learn more about human-centered design (HCD). During my time here, I have really been pushed to reconsider what it means to place the user’s experience at the center of a design process, particularly in the context of built environment design and community development.