• Use the assessment for your program planning.

From our experience, the assessment benefited our work by spreading the word about literacy throughout the community, igniting action among service providers to learn more about adult literacy, and it helped us focus on certain areas (e.g. seniors, young adults) in our communities.

Do

Much of what we learned about community development and capacity building came from actually doing the work. Participating in interagency meetings, providing presentations and workshops, and joining planning committees for community resource fairs, are examples of doing the work.

We learned that we needed to clearly convey that we work with, not for people and organizations. Offer your services as a consultant and facilitator. It is important to know that you are not a contractor. Working with service providers to make changes within their own organization is capacity building. We learned that building community capacity happens when we pass along our knowledge and tools. Our work was successful when we gave it away.

We also learned that an important way to build community capacity was to acknowledge the positive things people and organizations were doing instead of looking at what they were not doing.

Explaining to clients how to get to the organization by describing landmarks as well as street names is a positive literacy practice. Although many would just call this good service, it is also literacy friendly because of including non-print indicators of how to get to an agency.

We emphasized that just by providing quality client service there is already some degree of positive literacy practices in existence in their workplace. This is sometimes called a strengths-based approach, which always looks first at the things people and organizations are doing well, and builds on them.