In Seattle, an 84-year-old man has created a phone circle in which 70 elderly, housebound participants get a few friendly calls each day. In New York, a not-for-profit corporation is developing the city’s largest new manufacturing plant in 50 years with plans to employ 1500 local residents.

These disparate cases share two main ingredients—a belief that local skills and talents can be marshalled to improve community life, and a malleable “tool,” the capacity inventory, to help locate those assets. How six vastly different community organizations utilized this tool is spelled out in A Guide to Capacity Inventories: Mobilizing the Community Skills of Local Residents (1997).

The guide is the fourth in a series of six workbooks published by IPR’s ABCD Institute. Co-directors John McKnight and John Kretzmann wrote the guide with Geralyn Sheehan, an ABCD associate from Atlanta.

McKnight’s research group created the original capacity inventory with a local Chicago community group that wished to discover the skills and talents of its residents. The new guide describes how six groups, diversified in size, geography, constituency, and purpose, adapted the inventory. Though there is no one “correct” model, the book offers insights about goal-setting, data collection, and what has or hasn’t worked in the past.

The six case studies include:

- The Family Support Network of Seattle, which fosters supportive relationships between individuals and families. One successful project connected a family residing in public housing with people skilled in carpentry who built them some badly needed shelves.

- Interfaith Action is a church-based community group in Minneapolis that focuses on economic development in its largely Latino and low-income neighborhoods. Through its efforts, a local technical school agreed to hire a bilingual teacher and buy Spanish-language textbooks for Latino members who wanted to pursue entrepreneurial activities.

- Sierra County Children’s Health Collaborative promotes the physical and mental health of residents scattered throughout a 900-square-mile rural area of California. It has helped bring resident artists into elementary schools, identified local storytellers who have contributed their time to both schools and community functions, and established a computerized system, the Sierra Kids Action Network, to help people connect with each other’s skills and resources.

- Neighborhood Pride Team of Portland is comprised of formerly struggling, isolated, and low-income men and women. It was created to promote relationships that could decrease their isolation and build the local economy. The team is developing a microenterprise lending program, a temporary job service, and a job-matching and skills-exchange program.

- Mutual Partnerships Coalition of Seattle set out to establish intergenerational networks to reduce the isolation of its elderly population and improve the health of both younger and older residents. In addition to the seniors’ phone circle described earlier, it established a food bank for homebound elderly and disabled residents.

- Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association is a South Bronx not-for-profit corporation that builds community through housing, economic development, and educational activities. Among its accomplishments, it got approval and funding from the New York City Board of Education to open a high school that offers students hands-on community development experience toward their diploma.

The book may be ordered from ACTA Publications (800-397-2282) for $9.00.