Put the power of arts and culture to work in your community Part 1 of this unique guide distills research and emerging ideas behind culturally driven community development and explains key underlying principles. You'll understand the arts impact on community well-being and have the rationale for engaging others. Find inspiration and ideas from twenty case studies Part 2 gives you ten concrete strategies for building on the unique qualities of your own community. Each strategy is illustrated by two case studies taken from a variety of cities, small towns, and neighborhoods across the United States. You'll learn how people from all walks of life used culture and creativity as a glue to bind together people, ideas, enterprises, and institutions to make places more balanced and healthy. These examples are followed in Part 3 with six steps to assessing, planning, and implementing creative community building projects: 1. Assess Your Situation and Goals; 2. Identify and Recruit Effective Partners; 3. Map Values, Strengths, Assets, and History; 4. Focus on Your Key Asset, Vision, Identity, and Core Strategies; 5. Craft a Plan That Brings the Identity to Life; 6. Secure Funding, Policy Support, and Media Coverage. Detailed guidance, hands-on worksheets, and a hypothetical community sample walk you through the entire process. Each section includes additional resources as well as an appendix listing books, web sites, organizations, and research studies. By understanding the theoretical context (Part 1), learning from case studies (Part 2), and following the six steps (Part 3), you'll be able to build a more vibrant, creative, and equitable community.

Jack Zipes has reinvigorated storytelling as a successful and engaging tool for teachers and professional storytellers. Encouraging storytellers, librarians, and schoolteachers to be active in this magical process, Zipes proposes an interactive storytelling that creates and strengthens a sense of community for students, teachers and parents while extolling storytelling as animation, subversion, and self-discovery.

The Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence (RBA) is a national award for urban places that promotes innovative thinking about the built environment. Established in 1987, the award celebrates urban places distinguished by quality design-design that considers form in conjunction with social, economic, and environmental issues.

Put the power of arts and culture to work in your community Part 1 of this unique guide distills research and emerging ideas behind culturally driven community development and explains key underlying principles. You'll understand the arts impact on community well-being and have the rationale for engaging others. Find inspiration and ideas from twenty case studies Part 2 gives you ten concrete strategies for building on the unique qualities of your own community. Each strategy is illustrated by two case studies taken from a variety of cities, small towns, and neighborhoods across the United States. You'll learn how people from all walks of life used culture and creativity as a glue to bind together people, ideas, enterprises, and institutions to make places more balanced and healthy. These examples are followed in Part 3 with six steps to assessing, planning, and implementing creative community building projects: 1. Assess Your Situation and Goals; 2. Identify and Recruit Effective Partners; 3. Map Values, Strengths, Assets, and History; 4. Focus on Your Key Asset, Vision, Identity, and Core Strategies; 5. Craft a Plan That Brings the Identity to Life; 6. Secure Funding, Policy Support, and Media Coverage. Detailed guidance, hands-on worksheets, and a hypothetical community sample walk you through the entire process. Each section includes additional resources as well as an appendix listing books, web sites, organizations, and research studies. By understanding the theoretical context (Part 1), learning from case studies (Part 2), and following the six steps (Part 3), you'll be able to build a more vibrant, creative, and equitable community.

This book, in applying the asset mapping theory of Kretzmann and McKnight (1993), developed a positive communication strategy for minimizing conflicts and building a more Collaborative Communities in Organizations and Churches, with much emphasis on inclusivity, consensus and commitment to common vision and ideals. While critically reviewing the traditional conflict theories in their approaches to conflict management; the book uses the new lens provided by the asset mapping theory, to recommend for a paradigm shift in the way people look at organizations and conflicts. A new emphasis therefore is on the positive elements in organizations, the assets that lie within individuals and groups, as the key to minimizing conflict in organizations. Besides, unlike the traditional conflict theories which sees conflict as a problem, this new lens, sees conflict within organizations, as functional and opportunities for growth. The book equally identifies some of the significant factors that cause ethnic conflicts within organizations; such as, Prejudices among Ethnic Groups; Differences of Ethnic Groups; Power Struggle among Ethnic Groups; Discrimination and Injustice against Groups; Lack of Participatory Communication; and Lack of Participatory Leadership. Finally, in reviewing the relevant literatures on Community Building, the book underlines the various variables that make Community Building possible. Such variables include: Discovering and Mobilizing the Assets of Individuals and Groups within Organizations; Building Relationships among Individuals and Groups within Organizations; Building a more Participatory Leadership within Organizations; Building a more Participatory Communication within Organizations; Creating more Awareness on the necessity of Collaborative Initiatives, as well as, Promoting the Common Cultural Values and Ideals that holds Individuals and Groups together within Organization.

The author, a former apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, here offers enlightened views on community planning and gives a unique perspective on forms of contemporary human settlement.

Creative Community Planning provides clear access to emerging innovations in artistic, narrative, embodied and technological methods. Reflecting on the wide continuum of participatory practice, the authors explore the frontiers of community engagement within a fresh sustainability framework. Leading planning theorists, researchers and practitioners in the field reflect with the authors on the many successes and challenges in engaging with a diversity of people in rural and urban communities. These conversations reveal creativity as key to enhancing existing engagement practices. Concepts and practical applications thread through the book, including community visioning, participatory research and reporting, conflict resolution, poetry and planning language, theatre, photography, film and websites.