Tools for Practitioners | Community Planners

For Community Planners

The Community Problem-Solving Project through Massechusettes Institute of Technology provides an excellent model for community planners to utilize as they create community re-entry plans. The users of this site work in all three sectors - public, non-profit (or non-governmental), and private - and across them. The Strategy Tools section includes the following tools created by Xavier de Sousa-Briggs:

Organizing and Agenda Setting: This provides tools for bringing people together to effect change, picking issues effectively and getting them "on the radar screen" for the attention of others, turning "concern" into organized action, and identifying those with a stake in the issues (stakeholders), while building will and capacity for change.
Planning: This provides tools for planning given a set of identified problems or concerns, working with others to understand conditions and causes, generating possible solutions or options, and making decisions among the options.
Implementing Together (Co-Producing Solutions): This provides tools for implementing community projects when given a mandate, as well as some promising options for producing the needed results (more and more often through joint arrangements among stakeholders).

Learning Together and Managing Knowledge: This section gets players that are working together to learn more about the problems (especially when they don't see things the same way), about each other's interests, about what types of solutions or responses to problems are promising and why, and about what the barriers to action (including the players' own resistance) may be.
Negotiation, Mediation, and Consensus-Building: This section works to advance your interests (or those of your constituents) in a world in which more and more issues that matter are jointly decided with other players, rather than imposed "top-down" from above. It discusses how to manage conflict to get key decisions made legitimately and wisely. It also addresses how to deal with unequal power and gain more leverage.