This paper aims to provide guidelines for CBOs, and in particular Promise Neighborhood lead organizations, to consider when working with external evaluators and researchers. At the Harlem Children’s Zone® (HCZ®), we have learned many lessons over more than 30 years of collaborating with researchers. In this paper, we offer our perspective to other CBOs, in an attempt to share the knowledge we have gathered with those newer to the process.

This self-assessment tool contains several categories and, within each category, a set of statements communities can use to assess their current plans and capacity for developing a strong Promise Neighborhood implementation plan.

A critical incident is an event in which a leader attempted to address a challenge and things did not turn out as planned. This tool from Raj Chawla and Jolie Bain Pillsbury shows how critical incident analysis can help leaders see things in a new way and try something new.

Research Your Community is a new mapping tool available on the Healthy Food Access Portal that can help individuals and organizations better understand the communities in which they are working in to improve access to healthy food.

The tool can also be a valuable resource for your advocacy and fundraising efforts. The grocery landscape is ever changing, and data is one of many ways to paint a picture of a community’s need for healthy food access interventions. This webinar will train users about how to effectively leverage this new tool.

Created by Bridgespan for the Promise Neighborhoods Institute at PolicyLink, this 2010 guide is designed to help you hone your decision-making process so that you can focus on the issues that matter most to your initiative’s success.

This document, created by the Urban Institute, explores seven steps to align high-quality education with innovations in city and metropolitan planning and development.

This is a good example of a fact sheet to include with materials about your Promise Neighborhood to show funders, politicians, and stakeholders.

Download our guide to media and communications, with helpful talking points for talking to funders, the media, residents, and community groups about your Promise Neighborhood effort.

Use this toolkit to develop a strategic plan to tell compelling stories, engage with media, incorporate results-based accountability, write op-eds, letters to the editor, and blog posts, and create a social media plan.

Created by the Harlem Children’s Zone, PolicyLink, and the Center for the Study of Social Policy, with contributions by Child Trends, this document was released at the “Changing the Odds” conference in 2009 to advance the discussion about how a focus on results would contribute to the federal initiative.