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By Katharine Zywert, Project Officer, Social Prosperity Wood Buffalo
Launched in June 2012 at the Social Prosperity Learning Conference, the Social Prosperity Toolkit is a new online database containing over 90 resources designed to build nonprofit capacity and spark community innovation.
The Social Prosperity Toolkit has its origins in community conversations that explored the most pressing issues facing the nonprofit sector in Wood Buffalo. In 2011, SPWB’s Action Learning Teams brought together community leaders from the nonprofit sector, government, education, and industry in Wood Buffalo and Waterloo regions to develop transformational solutions in five priority areas: Arts and Culture, Capacity Building, Harnessing Great Ideas, Shared Space, and Social Planning. Meetings got to the heart of the nonprofit sector’s challenges and opportunities and identified solutions that were compiled into the Framework for Building Prosperous Communities, a collection of strategies designed to increase social prosperity by building capacity in the nonprofit sector.
Once the Framework was created, it became clear that community leaders and nonprofit senior management in Fort McMurray wanted to access tools and resources that would support them in implementing the strategies identified in the Framework. The Social Prosperity Toolkit is therefore organized according to the strategies presented in the Framework for Building Prosperous Communities. Unlike other online toolkits, it responds directly to local priorities for building capacity and inspiring community innovation.
The Social Prosperity Toolkit contains a wide variety of resources including articles, websites, books, blogs, and links to other resource databases. In creating the Social Prosperity Toolkit, Social Prosperity Wood Buffalo Staff have filtered through hundreds of resources in order to present the highest-quality tools. In an effort to make these resources even more accessible, resource sheets accompany many of the articles included in the toolkit, summarizing the article’s main points and highlighting the author’s great ideas. Resource sheets present articles and reports in a concise form and are designed to be used by nonprofit leaders, staff, and volunteers who wish to infuse their work with new ideas and best practices but whose busy schedules make it difficult for them to sift through lengthy resources.
Social Prosperity Wood Buffalo staff will be updating the toolkit as we learn more and as new resources become available. Please send any comments about or suggestions for the toolkit to [email protected].
