Communications play a key role in the success of every community engagement effort, from recruitment to sharing your successes. Everyday Democracy's Communications Toolkit is a comprehensive guide designed to help you recruit people to your community change effort, work with the media, master social media, and tell your story in many different formats along the way.
Making sure that all young people have equitable opportunities to do well in school and in life is key to the health of our communities and our whole democracy. This brief guide is designed to help you bring this essential work to your local school district and community.
Key lessons we have learned about addressing racism in community initiatives
Young people’s involvement and leadership is central to creating sustainable community change. But many community groups run into problems when they try to engage young people in their work. Here, we lay out solutions to some of the most common issues.
Your community has a story to tell, and video could be the best way to tell it. Video can be more captivating than stills or text. Check out this guide to help you get started on using video to tell your community's story.
This is a team building activity for an organizing coalition or action teams to use during their first or second meeting.
If you have a message that you want to spread to members in your community, you'll be more effective and reach more people if you have a clear strategy. Use this worksheet to help guide your team in creating a messaging strategy.
Images help bring your story to life and you can use them on almost all your promotional materials. If your program is just getting started, you can use stock photos. If you have your own, you can edit them using free tools available online.
Animated media offers a break from text and stills. You can create a video from photos you took at an event, or you can use a video camera to take some action shots and interviews of participants. If you’re interested in putting together a video, these tools can help you.
A website or blog can help you spread the word about your dialogues, post pictures and stories from your events, and share your success with your community and potential funders. The task of setting up and maintaining a website can seem daunting, but these tools will have you reaching out to your community in no time.
Our ultimate goal is to create positive community change that includes everyone, and our tools, advice, and resources foster that kind of change. Whether you’re grappling with a divisive community issue, or simply want to include residents’ voices in city government, Everyday Democracy's Dialogue to Change process, using a racial equity lens, can help.
