Digital Park: A Capacity Building Initiative for Distressed Communities

Digital Campus "Parks" provide a support system for development of local virtual organizations with a "universal" format and overlays that customize the "Digital Park" for each participating community. Digital Parks provide capacity building resources to support needs in distressed communities. They interface with K-16 school faculty, local non-profits, faith-based groups, and local and city agencies. They (1) utilize GIS software to map risk factors for youth and children (2) take a science-based approach to solutions (3) provide training, education, on-line multimedia resources, and software functions for collaborative and capacity building activities (4) guide the allocation of resources and (5) improve the performance of all groups in the collaborative for needed tasks.

Community Capacity Building Collaboratives

There are many small non-profit organizations and faith-based groups, city agencies, community boards, policing, economic and community development groups in/concerned with activities in distressed communities. Each addresses a "problem" from an aspect of their particular expertise or mission. The smaller groups tend to be high on mission and good will, low on resources and/or lacking in the kind of education and training that could improve performance even with a shortfall of resources. Yet these communities are where high impact capacity is needed.

Digital Parks are designed to support capacity-building collaboratives. Pre-development of software systems that support the collaborative includes an analysis of organizations that agree to participate prior to adding a custom overlay to the local Digital Park. The project (1) utilizes GIS software systems to map risk factors for youth and children in the local community (2) seeks consensus on a plan that prioritizes services (3)provides hands-on education and training on all aspects of organizational capacity building (which is video taped and incorporated in a professional/organizational development archive of resources) (4) provides a software support system of functions that serves as a program planner, management system and "shared backroom" for smaller organizations (5) includes a support system for planning among participants in the collaborative.

Digital Parks include a Youth Council; young people trained to serve as youth leaders who participate in program planning as well. Among them are cyber-journalist who reflect the "voices" of youth in the community and document programs for the community website. Digital Parks include a community website that features all participating organizations.