Introducing the Building Communities Blog
Welcome to the Building Communities Blog!
Welcome to the official blog of Building Communities, where over the next five months, we’ll be sharing a series of 68 essays designed to explore and illuminate the strategies, insights, and methodologies that help communities envision and create their own economic futures. These essays are drawn from decades of hands-on experience in 82 communities across the United States, including Indigenous and tribal communities, and are organized into topics that cover every essential aspect of community-based strategic planning.
This blog is designed to be more than just reading material—it’s a resource for community leaders, planners, and residents who want to understand how to take meaningful, actionable steps toward shaping their own futures. Each essay offers practical guidance, thought-provoking ideas, and tools you can use to strengthen your community’s capacity, align local efforts, and spark collaboration. Whether you’re looking to better understand your community’s strengths, assess its capacity, or implement impactful strategies, these posts are meant to inspire, inform, and empower you and those around you.
The essays are organized into the following categories, each highlighting a critical component of community-based economic development: Methodology and Purpose, which lays the foundation for the approach we use; Community Sentiment, which examines the motivations, engagement, and perspectives of residents; Civic Capacity, assessing the human, technical, and financial resources communities have to achieve their goals; Strategies and Key Success Factor Analysis, which provide actionable insights to guide planning; Committee Input and Action Steps, which focus on collaboration, decision-making, and measurable implementation; Land Use Implications, exploring how physical planning supports economic and social objectives; Formulating a Local Progress Board, which tracks and communicates results to stakeholders; Building Communities Speaking Topics, sharing insights for wider discussion and learning; and Sustainability, ensuring that all planning supports long-term resilience and vitality.
Over the coming months, we’ll release three essays per week, providing a structured, in-depth exploration of each topic. Readers will be able to follow individual threads of interest or experience the full arc of the methodology from start to finish. Each post is designed to be practical, actionable, and relevant to real communities, while also inspiring discussion and local engagement. You’ll see how these ideas interconnect, how they have been applied in diverse contexts, and how they can be adapted to fit the unique characteristics of your own community.
Stay tuned as we roll out this series of essays, and join us in exploring the methods, strategies, and insights that can help communities everywhere turn their vision for the future into reality. Together, we can make the process of planning, implementing, and sustaining community development accessible, understandable, and actionable for everyone.