You have just been elected to the village council. Unfortunately, you are not yet an expert in land-use policy, economic development, agricultural development or roads and corridor issues. What are you going to do?
"You need to get a fast education on community development," suggests Timothy Cullenen of Cornell's Community and Rural Development (CaRDI) program.
Learning quickly online is now possible at www.cdtoolbox.org, a new web site developed by faculty and researchers at CaRDI and Pennsylvania State University's Cooperative Extension division.
Cullenen says the site provides users, from newly elected officials to extension educators, ways to implement sound municipal development decisions that ultimately will determine their communities' long-term futures. "In many communities, making decisions is constrained by a limited understanding of the problems facing the local leaders," said Cullenen. "This is not true in every town, but in many rural places the breadth of problems eclipses the training, knowledge or experience of most local officials."
The web site offers a step-by-step guide to getting started through "charting and visioning." Visioning, the web site explains, is a preliminary assessment of a municipality's issues by a core group of residents. In turn, visions are made by "charting," a months-long process in which a larger group of users analyzes the ideas, identifies community goals and then makes plans to achieve those goals.
The site provides training in assessing the size and performance of the local retail market, germinating e-commerce for small businesses, retaining and expanding businesses and using employment data to understand the local economy.
"Marketing Main Street," according to the site, is a matter of understanding available consumer and business information and using that information to make informed community decisions. For example, Martin Shields of Penn State University contributes a section on assessing the local retail market. He provides tools, such as worksheets, that help indicate a municipality's retail strength. Cullenen explains that each tool within the toolbox of information follows a similar approach. "The toolbox can assist community leaders in working through the municipal development process. By analyzing existing situations and learning about alternatives, communities can create a new future with an improved quality of life for themselves," he said.
The site is funded by a Smith-Lever grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Cornell Cooperative Extension.
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