What is it

The Community Collaboration Tool is a customizable PowerPoint tool to help bring people together about issues that are important for the health, education and well-being of young people.

The tool consists of a PowerPoint presentation and an instruction manual detailing the steps necessary to customize it for use in your state or community. The presentation provides practical examples for how community, family, and school can be strengthened through non-school-hour youth development programs. Included in the presentation are questions designed to initiate discussion among state and community groups.

History

In 2004, The Building Partnerships for Youth project, in collaboration with the Hawaii Department of Health and the Hawaii Building Partnerships for Youth Planning team, developed a customizable PowerPoint tool to help bring people throughout the islands together about issues that are important for the health, education and well-being of young people. The goals of this project were to:

1. Create a resource that would increase opportunities for youth-serving organizations to partner, coordinate, and collaborate with each other to increase young people’s access to non-school-hour youth development programs.
2. Create a resource that would serve as a catalyst for discussion among individuals across the state of Hawaii.

To accomplish these goals, a presentation using an ecological approach to understanding youth development was created. The presentation provided practical examples for how community, family, and school can be strengthened through non-school-hour youth development programs. Included in the presentation are questions designed to initiate discussion among state and community groups. Due to the positive responses we received from participants at the presentation, we were encouraged to develop a tool that could be customized and used in states and communities across the nation.

Customizable

The Building Partnerships for Youth Collaboration Building Tool is just such a tool. It has been designed as a template so that the issues important in your community can be respected, so your accomplishments can be made visible, and so the goals for your state or community can be the focus. We encourage you to look at this presentation and think broadly about how it could be used in your state or community.

Because every situation is unique, we ask that you keep in mind that this is a template. In that spirit, we encourage you to customize it to your needs. One way to achieve this is by adding photos and quotes, wherever possible, from people who live or work in your state or community.

Additionally there are a number of places throughout the tool where space has been left for you to add appropriate state or community information that depicts your situation. As you progress through the tool, please refer to the notes page found at the bottom of each slide for helpful hints on both the customization of the template and the presentation of the PowerPoint.

We wish to acknowledge the following individuals and organizations for the development of this tool:

Building Partnerships for Youth Project
Karen Hoffman Tepper, Ph.D.
Dan McDonald, Ph.D.
James Roebuck, M.A.
Dr. Richard Shepherd Zeldin, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Hawaii Department of Health
Family Health Services Division, Maternal and Child Health Branch
Alcohol and Drug Abuse Division
Hawaii Building Partnerships for Youth Planning Committee
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – Division of Adolescent and School Health

This document was supported by a Cooperative Agreement Number U87/CCU318437-01 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The contents of this document are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.