Civic entrepreneurs build relationships between different sectors in a community. This enables communities to better address their problems, and to collaboratively work on their long-term development. Civic entrepreneurs can come from the nonprofit, business, government, education, or other sectors.
Community Capacity Builders Civic Entrepreneurship Program is underpinned by Education for Sustainability principles. It takes a project based learning approach: while learning about community capacity building, participants take any community issue of their choice through the program and develop a collaborative community capacity building project that addresses their community issue.
The Program consists of three units:
Community Capacity Builders Civic Entrepreneurship Program is underpinned by Education for Sustainability principles. It takes a project based learning approach: while learning about community capacity building, participants take any community issue of their choice through the program and develop a collaborative community capacity building project that addresses their community issue.
The Program consists of three units:
- Learning About the Community
- Using this Learning to Take Action, and
- Sustaining the Development Achieved
Unit 1Learning About the Community
In Unit 1 participants learn about their community as they research their community issue.
Participants identity strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that are relevant to taking action on their issue and identify community sectors and stakeholders that may be willing to collaborate on addressing the issue that they are exploring. |
Unit 2Using the Learning to Take Action
In Unit 2 participants take action on their community issue.
After examining effective dialogue and deliberation techniques to harness the community’s collective intelligence, participants create a shared vision of the future for their community issue. Objectives or goals, strategies and action plans are created for reaching this future vision. The strategies developed are bridged to the strategic directions of governments. |
Unit 3Sustaining the Development Achieved
In Unit 3 participants sustain the development they have achieved from taking action on their community issue.
Participants identify how they can support other community members to take action, by taking on a community connector role and practicing post-heroic forms of leadership. They develop a social marketing strategy to increase stakeholder participation in future activities and develop an evaluation plan to assist them in learning from their activities and improving their practice. |