The National Civic League assists communities in advancing their civic engagement, strategic planning processes, and capacity for collaborative problem solving through such services as training, facilitation, visioning, research, and assessment.
A long-established leader in civic engagement, the National Civic Leage (NCL) offers several prestigious community awards, such as the annual All-American City Award. NCL also serves as a consulting service for communities, called Community Services, and, through membership, provides access to a broad network of civic engagement leaders.
Through its Community Services, NCL has completed over 40 projects with local governments, businesses, and nonprofits in over 20 states. These projects most commonly focus on NCL’s service of community visioning and strategic planning. Other common project foci include capacity building, race and diversity, and local government performance management. In each project, NCL pays special attention to sustainability, equity, government transparency, and elements of smart growth. Technical assistance, training, and diagnostic tools for citizens to assess community civic health are just some of NCL’s more specific services. More long-term support services include multi-stakeholder collaboratives, community driven decision-making processes, and analytical research.
NCL is currently developing a Community Sustainability Civic Engagement Tool Kit based on the outcomes of its engagement and consulting work in Broomfield, Colorado. The Broomfield project is meant to establish more sustainable resource conservation in Broomfield. NCL hopes that this new Tool Kit will help other communities establish sustainable action plans of their own.
Other offerings of NCL include the National Civic Review, a quarterly journal featuring essays on democratic governance and civic engagement—just one of NCL’s helpful publications, which is free through membership. NCL also offers several online publications, including its Community Visioning and Strategic Planning Handbook (2000) and Community Building In Kansas City: Lessons Learned(2001), which reports on NCL’s study of several civic organizations in Kansas City, Missouri—a project of NCL’s Alliance for National Renewal (ANR).
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