Background and History

Founded in 2000, the Community Building Institute (CBI) helps communities improve the way they conduct public business to be more inclusive, more collaborative, and more effective in order to build vibrant, sustainable, and equitable communities. CBI works with all levels of government, nonprofits, foundations, and other community focused organizations, offering a complementary set of services. These services are often “bundled” to support the needs of the client. They include:

• Facilitation and mediation services. CBI helps diverse groups work together better, improving relationships, building plans, and working on implementation.
• Designing large scale collaborative processes. Many communities – recognizing the need to engage citizens and stakeholders in different ways – need different kinds of meetings sequenced over times to achieve results. CBI helps design processes that link consensus building, internal engagement, public participation, and public communications.
• Help government build capacity to become more collaborative. Increasing numbers of public issues require deeper collaboration within and across agencies. CBI helps build the capacity to collaborate internally with strategic advice, coaching, training, team building, and development of internal protocols and charters.
• Engage in research and reflective practices. Learning from doing is often a central element of internal change and innovation diffusion efforts. CBI has developed numerous publications and documents that reflect lessons learned and helped teams learn from their efforts.
• Lead strategic planning and repositioning efforts for nonprofits. Nonprofit organizations often need assistance with finding unique and appropriate niches within increasingly populated civic spaces. CBI helps organizations discern new strategies and find profitable niches for action.