Community Capacity Building

The citizens of our region want many of the same things:  personal health and well-being, economic opportunity, and healthy ecosystems.  Wanting something, however, is not usually sufficient for achieving it.  Pursuing and ultimately achieving a goal often requires a specific set of knowledge, skills, and resources, most of which are not innate but all of which are often learnable.  Community capacity can be thought of as the collection of knowledge, skills, and resources community members possess and use to work together to identify, pursue, and achieve shared goals. There are many people and programs in the Northeast working to strengthen the capacity of our communities.  The Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development works with land grant and other key partners across the region and nationally to pursue cutting-edge research, develop educational resources and provide training designed to help residents of the Northeast work together, within communities and regions, to identify, pursue, and achieve their goals.