Welcome to the Community Tool Box (CTB)
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.
Our dream is probably the same as yours. We want to see our communities, our states or provinces, our countries, and our world become healthier places to live. Our belief is that we, as individuals or as members of small groups, can do quite a lot. We have seen countless people around the world quietly (or not so quietly) change their communities for the better.
The Community Tool Box was created to help leaders bring about the changes they envision. While the power of one is tremendous, that one needs help. He or she needs the knowledge, information, and tools to bring about those changes. The Community Tool Box was developed to fill that gap and help thoughtful, informed citizens make their communities what they dream they can be.
About the Community Tool Box
Development of the Community Tool Box has been ongoing since 1994, and is a public service of the University of Kansas. The Community Tool Box is developed and managed by the Work Group for Community Health and Development at the University of Kansas, and partners nationally and internationally. 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.
Our team has worked to identify what users might need to know to be able to do this work of building healthier and more equitable communities. The Tool Box provides more than 7,000 pages of practical information to support community health and development work. The focus is on specific practical skills, such as conducting a meeting or participatory evaluation, that help create conditions for health and human development.
We hope you will browse through the Tool Box and use it to support your change and improvement efforts.