This guide is a resource for coaches who are currently working on or are planning to work with communities to promote change.

This Making Connections Peer Technical Assistance Match report summarizes the learnings from a meeting of two Making Connections sites -- Hartford, Connecticut, and Providence, Rhode Island -- when key members from the communities came together to exchange ideas and experiences about engaging youth in community change.

A new Child Trends brief helps funders, administrators, and practitioners find evidence-based programs that may be appropriate for their target populations and communities. The Guide provides an overview of 22 resources and 12 searchable online databases that offer information on a range of evidence-based intervention programs.

CLASP facilitates the work of the Communities Collaborating to Reconnect Youth (CCRY) Network. The CCRY Network empowers communities to create effective, innovative partnerships among local youth-serving systems; and it promotes collaboration and peer-to-peer networking among communities across the country in order to share ideas, challenges, lessons, and best practices for reconnecting youth.

President Obama recently announced a new summer service initiative in partnership with the Corporation for National and Community Service. Local service projects can find volunteers and volunteers can find projects in education, health, energy, the environment and more.

The Search Institute conference (November 5-7, 2009 in Cincinnati) brings together people from different community sectors nationally and internationally who share a common goal: to work together to promote positive youth development through asset building.

The second edition of this Forum for Youth Investment report has information on program observation tools -- a good resource for practitioners, researchers, and policymakers trying to choose or develop such measures.

Run to Vote combines the sport of track and field with your pledge to vote in 2008. A nonpartisan voting drive led by students and teachers from Granville Central High School in Stem, North Carolina, the Run to Vote team is traveling through 48 states to register people to vote, and collecting pledges to participate in the election this November. For every person that registers to vote or pledges to vote, one of the teachers, or volunteers from the team, will run the equivalent lap on a quarter mile track. Through July 5, 2008, the team has run 814 laps, registered 153 people in 18 states and collected more than a thousand citizen pledges to vote.

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.

Doing Good Together is a nonprofit organization that encourages, supports and educates parents and caregivers who want to engage with their children in volunteering, charitable giving, and social, environmental and political action.