Tools
The 2024 Elections and Beyond: Fortifying Ourselves, Our Organizations, and Our Ecosystems
Building Movement ProjectElection cycles can be opportunities to deepen community engagement, sharpen narratives, and clarify organizational and movement values. As we head towards the November 2024 elections, how can we prepare ourselves as individuals and organizations to play the right roles, to respond quickly to unfolding events, and to buttress our connections and partnerships?
Doing Engagement from Home A Toolbox for Municipal Staff
MAPCDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, the Community Engagement Department of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) conducted extensive research on digital engagement tools and methods. This document includes many tools that municipal staff can use to engage the public remotely. This document is intended as a resource and does not constitute endorsement of any of these tools. MAPC does not use every tool in this list— for questions about individual tools, reach out to the tool’s Help or Support staff.
Hybrid Engagement Hub: Navigating Together
MAPC Community Engagement DivisionThis project hub is designed to be a central source of information to support you as you develop your approach to hybrid meetings, investigate tools, and design public participation at the local level.
Worforce Training Fund Express Program - Passive House and LEED certifications
BE+Any company is eligible for $30,000 of training per year through this grant application. There are many certification for building sustainability measures.
Commonwealth Workforce Training Fund Express Program
Workforce Training Fund50 courses approved to provide PHIUS Certified Passive House Consultant training.
Highlights from Cool, Climate-safe Cities: New Solutions & Research
BU Institute for Sustainable EnergyWebinar Recording for Event
Impact of Climate Change on Health
National Institute for Health Care Management FoundationClimate change is the single biggest health threat facing humanity and it is disproportionately felt by the most vulnerable and disadvantaged according to a recent World Health Organization (WHO) special report. This infographic explains links between climate change and health.
Organizing and Engagement Core Skills Toolkit
Mel King Institute, Rising Sun ConsultingThis toolkit was designed to support the professional growth of community organizers and community engagement staff. The toolkit was developed by and for organizers! Front line organizers helped identify the 6 competency areas and piloted the tools, offering feedback on content and format.
Creativity and Community Action
David M. Greenberg, LISCIn a new essay and workbook from David M. Greenberg, LISC's vice president for Knowledge Management and Strategy, practitioners are posed with two parallel questions: how can community development and activism enhance artistic and cultural work? And how can cultural practice community development and activism? Using paintings, poetry, and the work of artist-activists in Logan Square, Chicago, as “cases,” the resource helps enhance the reach, ambition, and impact of collaborations between artists and community organizations.
Climate Resilient Land Use Strategies
Metropolitan Area Planning CouncilLand use regulations can be a powerful tool to provide climate resilience. From floodplain and wetlands restrictions, to tree protection and water conservation, to design standards and zoning, communities are using their regulatory authority to address the growing impacts of rainstorms, sea level rise, heat, and drought.
YW Boston’s 2021 Small Biz Map
YW BostonSupport businesses run by women and people of color in Greater Boston
Existing Buildings and Climate Change Resources
Boston Society for ArchitectureWe cannot meet our future goals without utilizing our greatest built and cultural assets: existing buildings. Below are some resources to support the industry as we forge ahead.
State Support for Local School Construction: Leveraging Equity and Diversity
Lauren Mittman, Nikhil De, and Philip TegelerHistorically, state support for suburban school construction facilitated white flight and metropolitan segregation. The least we can do today is think more carefully about the impacts of future school construction funding. PRRAC has prepared a policy brief on this question, based on a state-by-state survey of current practices.
Best Practices for RAD "Choice-Mobility" Implementation
Poverty & Race Research Action CouncilThe Rental Assistance Demonstration has become the most significant public housing redevelopment program in the U.S., bringing new funds to support aging properties around the country. One essential element of the program is that, after conversion, all tenants have a right to request a portable Housing Choice Voucher, and move to a community of their choice (thus opening up their apartment to another eligible family on the waiting list). Few housing authorities have worked out plans for implementation of this Choice-Mobility feature of the program, so we have developed a guidance document for PHAs and advocates, based on extensive policy research and interviews.
Fifty Years Of “The People v. HUD”
Poverty & Race research Action Council (PRRAC)HUD has benefited enormously from strong civil rights advocacy, and many of HUD’s most important regulatory guidelines have emerged from this advocacy. We offer this selected timeline as a tribute to this ongoing history and, we hope, an inspiration to a new generation of civil rights and tenant activists.
Arts & Planning Toolkit
MAPCThe Arts and Planning Toolkit has been given a reboot to become better aligned with the needs of municipal planners who are doing arts and culture-related work. Each page now follows a consistent outline of tools, resources, and examples to show how ideas may be put into action.
Opportunity360 Community Dashboard
EnterpriseOpportunity360 Community Dashboards provide the information necessary to determine where action is most needed and where established programs and policies have been most successful in any neighborhood in the country. These dashboards now allow data comparison for up to three census tracts, anywhere in the US. In the free Opportunity360 Community Dashboards, you will find over 150 indicators from 27 sources.
Housing Matters
Urban InstituteHousing Matters is an online resource for the most rigorous research and practical information on how a quality, stable, affordable home in a vibrant community contributes to individual and community success.
Radical Imagination
Angela Glover Blackwell; Powered by PolicyLinkTo imagine radically, means to think big, demand better, and redefine the terms of the struggle; the Radical Imagination podcast delivers all that. The debut season confronts the challenging issues facing our nation, including immigration, the need for big new economic ideas, the impact of climate change, revolutionary approaches to community safety and justice, and more.
The Move
Ceasar McDowell, Founder; Ayushi Roy, Podcast co-host; Misael Galdamez, Website Author; Julia Curbera, Website AuthorThe Move is a movement to rebuild our public’s muscle for democracy. This movement aims to bring together people of all backgrounds who are seeking to facilitate real civic engagement in today’s democracies. The Move rebuilds our public muscle in three ways: We will partner in the design and implementation of at least one civic engagement project each year. We will provide a collaborative learning and knowledge exchange platform on TheMove.MIT.edu and it’s adjacent social media channels for cities, institutions, and community organizations. We will advance learning, experimentation, and innovation in civic design using eight design principles.
Massachusetts Defense For Eviction (MADE): Self-Guided Eviction Help
Greater Boston Legal Services (GBLS)This completely free guided interview is for Massachusetts tenants who are being evicted. It is estimated to take between 25 and 90 minutes for a typical tenant to use on their own. It will help you make sure that you respond to your landlord's eviction case correctly.
Boston Neighborhood Change Interactive Map
Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard UniversityA new interactive mapping tool showing the dramatic demographic, social, and economic changes that have occurred in Greater Boston since 1990. The tool includes data from the 1990 and 2000 decennial censuses and from the American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates for 2010 and 2016.
Prosperity Now Scorecard
Prosperity Now ScorecardA comprehensive resource for data on household financial health, racial economic inequality and policy recommendations to help put everyone in our country on a path to prosperity.
The National Equity Research Database, Boston Edition
Brandeis Institute for Child, Youth and Family PolicyThis is a database of 286 socio-economic indicators on a wide range of subjects, including demography, education, employment, health, housing, earnings and ancestry covering the Boston metropolitan area.
Building Blocks: Connecting People, Places and Policies
Enterprise Community PartnersA podcast for thought-provoking conversations about the current issues, trends, ideas and big questions facing the affordable housing and community development field in the United States.
MASSCAP Trainings: Recorded Webinars
MASSCAPThis resource contains all the past recorded webinars from MASSCAP (Understanding Immigrant Rights, Community Action Impact, Succession Planning, and More!)
Operationalizing Racial Equity & Inclusion at Living Cities: Tools for Getting Started and Keeping At It
Living CitiesThese are some of the resources and contacts LC has shared with organizations who are looking to embed racial equity and inclusion into their work.
Opportunity Zone Eligibility Tool
The Opportunity360 team created the tool below to help states and others interested in opportunity zone eligibility to determine which tracts in their state or region are eligible and how eligible tracts relate to other federal programs and designations.
Advancements in measuring bicycle and pedestrian accessibility
State Smart Transportation InitiativeJennifer Boldry from People For Bikes and Spencer Gardner from Toole Design Group discussed their new open source Bike Network Accessibility tool, and Chris McCahill from SSTI showed how pedestrian accessibility measures have been applied in Sacramento, Calif., Madison, Wisc., and Virginia.
Racial Identity Caucusing: A Strategy for Building Anti-Racist Collectives
CrossroadsThis toolkit describes methods for anti-racism work and the value of caucusing
Mapped: How the US Generates Electricity
CarbonbriefCarbon Brief has plotted the nation’s power stations in an interactive map to show how and where the US generates electricity.
Understanding Systemic Racism
Race Forward"What Is Systemic Racism?" is an 8-part video series that shows how racism shows up in our lives across institutions and society: Wealth Gap, Employment, Housing Discrimination, Government Surveillance, Incarceration, Drug Arrests, Immigration Arrests, Infant Mortality
Rejecting Bigotry, Demanding Action
Opportunity AgendaTogether with UnidosUS, The Opportunity Agenda completed public opinion and messaging research with this goal in mind: to tell a story of American diversity that reflects our values and our aspirations as a country stronger because of our myriad backgrounds, ethnicities, races, experiences – because of the parts of us that may make us different, but ultimately also make us stronger. This research provides guidance for those using their platforms to reject bigotry while demand action.
Greening Our Grid
MAPC“Greening our Grid” is a fact sheet and a case study detailing MAPC’s new strategy to use municipal aggregation to help build new renewable energy in New England
Perfect Fit Parking
MAPCParking is a point of contention in communities across Metro Boston, yet many deliberations about the topic occur in the absence of hard data about how much parking we have, and how much we need. The Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) has begun a multi-phase initiative to develop the data and tools that communities need to establish informed, sustainable, and economical parking policies.
Rolling Back Inclusion
The Democracy CollaborativeIn order to help communities across the country—both rural and urban—speak up in a moment in which the administration has made clear its intentions to scale back or dismantle these key federal frameworks, we will be tracking the new federal attacks on inclusive community development here, along with state-level measures enabled and encouraged by the new federal context.
All America Conversations Toolkit
National Civic LeagueAll-America Conversations are designed to help cities and other groups understand residents’ aspirations for the community, the divisions facing the community and, most importantly, the small, specific actions that give people a sense of confidence that we can work across dividing lines.
Racial Wealth Audit
The Institute on Assets and Social Policy; DemosThis interactive online tool uses real-world examples to help policymakers and advocates explore and understand the causes and effects of the racial wealth gap.
MAPC Local Access Score
MAPCThe Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC)'s active transportation network utility score for each segment of roadway indicates how useful that street segment is for connecting residents with schools, shops, restaurants, parks, and transit stations.
Glossary for Senior-Related Housing and Healthcare Terms in Massachusetts
The Community Builders, Jewish Community Housing for the Elderly, and LeadingAge MAThis glossary is intended to provide a primer on housing and healthcare terms, so that professionals in both housing and healthcare can work collaboratively to ensure that there is sufficient and high-quality housing and services for older adults.