Growing skills and confidence

All community groups will consist of individuals with a range of experience and abilities. There will also be areas in which your group and its members can increase their knowledge, skills and confidence. As a result, your group should be more effective at what it is trying to achieve.

Below you will find resources relating to developing the skills and confidence of your group. Many of these resources have a focus on community capacity building which can be defined as:

activities, resources and support that strengthen the skills, abilities and confidence of people and community groups to take effective action and leading roles in the development of communities (Skinner, 2006)

Title	Summary
Building Stronger Communities	Building Stronger Communities sets out a common framework to help partners at strategic, practitioner and community levels to adopt a strategic participatory approach to building community capacity. It is aimed at a strategic level but is a vital resource for anyone involved in building the skills, confidence and organisation of communities. It is available to download for free from Scottish Community Development Centre's website.	More

Clarity for a change	A great jargon buster for those who want to find out how community development approaches can benefit their group. Written by Scottish Community Development Network (SCDN).	More

Community Toolbox	An online resource from the USA containing freely available tools on a variety of tools offering step-by-step guidance in, amongst other things, community-building skills. Manages to avoid being overly culturally specific to an American context.	More

Health Issues in the Community	Health Issues in the Community, or HIIC, is a training programme which focuses on links between health issues and wider social issues in order to build confidence, skills, involvement and community organisation. One of HIIC's main strengths is that it also provides training for people to become HIIC tutors, so that skills can be passed on within communties.	More

Supporting Communities	Now in year three, Supporting Communities is a programme which supports community organisations and their partners in Scotland. Delivered by Scottish Community Development Centre, this support is intended to enable community organisations (at all levels and stages) to improve their effectiveness and influence over the community needs and priorities that they are involved in tackling.	More

Voluntary Sector Network	This section of the Guardian newspaper website contains useful articles on various aspects of running a charity, ranging from online security to governance and accounts.	More


What is community capacity building?	Community capacity buidling means supporting communities to achieve the changes they want to see - this animated video from SCDC explains how this is done and why it is needed.	More