The Innovation Center offers excellent, free guides to mapping community strengths and needs, engaging youth and adults together, planning civic and local action—and creating lasting change in communities and for participants. You’ll want to bookmark this library! For lessons learned and strategies to engage youth and create effective community programs, visit the Research Pages.

This National Crime Prevention Council toolkit acts as a step-by-step guide for forming an action team, assessing school safety and security, holding a forum with stakeholders to brainstorm solutions, developing and promoting an action plan, and evaluating the results.

If you have ever worked with a teacher to improve your child's education or you have been an advocate—someone who looks out for the interests of another, someone who speaks up on behalf of another. Advocates identify a problem, an unrecognized need, a service gap in a caring community, an injustice, possibly a mistake or unintended consequence in a policy or procedure that hurts those who cannot speak up for themselves. And then they go to work to find solutions.

This guide is designed to help adults working with adolescents and youth find appropriate assessments and support young people's career development. It also provides a learning needs screening tool for youth with suspected learning disabilities.

This Northwest Finance Circle Toolkit gives child care centers an accounting outline to calculate the true cost of quality budgets. Even if the budget is beyond the reach of what parents can pay, it can be used to demonstrate the gap between the true cost of high quality programs and the actual price parents are charged for services.

If your nonprofit organization works with low-wage families, you can help make sure they don't miss out on important federal tax benefits that can add up to as much as $4,200. This toolkit from the National Assembly's Family Strengthening Policy Center explains the Earned Income Tax Credit and offers ways to inform your clients and employees. For multiple hard copies, contact or call 202-347-2080, Ext. 25.

Family Initiative's Action Kit has a step-by-step guide and tools to take action and create better quality, more affordable child care choices for families.

With April 15th fast approaching, families are wrestling with their tax forms and hoping for refunds. A key tool for easing the tax burden on low-income working families is the Earned Income Tax Credit. Fortunately, there's lots of help available online to assist taxpayers in taking advantage of the EITC.

The YouthARTS Web site is designed to give arts agencies, juvenile justice agencies, social service organizations, and other community-based organizations detailed information about how to plan, run, provide training, and evaluate arts programs for at-risk youth.