Resource Database

The Rural Active Living Assessment (RALA) Tools assess the physical environment features and amenities, town characteristics, community programs, and policies that can affect physical activity among residents in rural communities. This tool is suitable for both practitioners and researchers. The tools include a RALA Codebook that provides users with a practical and simple guide for implementing the tool in rural communities across the U.S.

This paper outlines the challenges that many communities face with conventional pen and paper count programs. It then identifies many new technologies that can automate, simplify, and expedite the collection of bicycle and pedestrian data.

The Community Tool Box is a service of the Center for Community Health and Development at the University of Kansas. The Community Tool Box offers thousands of pages of tips and tools concerning community development topics such as community assessment, planning, intervention, evaluation, and advocacy.

Gem State Prospector, sponsored by the Idaho Department of Commerce, is an interactive tool which provides statistics to help you perform market comparisons and choose the optimal location for potential businesses. You can search for stats on every Idaho city, county, and region. Each report contains an interactive map of the community and data on its labor force, wages, education levels, demographics, and consumer expenditures.

The Centers for Disease Control Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is a tool that can help communities, decision makers, and practitioners make choices that improve public health through community design. HIA is a process that helps evaluate the potential health effects of a plan, project, or policy before it is built or implemented. HIA brings potential positive and negative public health impacts and considerations to the decision-making process for plans, projects, and policies that fall outside traditional public health arenas, such as transportation and land use. An HIA provides practical recommendations to increase positive health effects and minimize negative health effects. HIA toolkits are available for transportation projects as well as parks and trails.

From the Main Street Guide from Village Well "Main streets are the thriving heart of the local economy, influencing the economic, cultural, social and environmental fabric of the surrounding area. They are places where people live, work and play; however in recent years, many main streets have been in decline as the rise of online shopping, increased dependence on cars, and big regional shopping centres have dominated the retail scene.

Today, the old-fashioned pattern of local villages serving their communities is in vogue again. Local villages are seen as the key to supporting a healthier, more walkable and sustainable lifestyle, better connected local communities and greater opportunity for local economic development.

It’s becoming more widely recognised that our streets are valuable community assets. Creating a great main street requires a return to human-scale elements (textural building materials, sounds, wafts of delicious food, window shopping, trees, smaller sized retail spaces, park benches), and putting people back as the focus. It requires deep community participation, forward thinking design activities, food, beauty and embedding local identity.

This simple Guide provides 10 key steps to create a great main street and demonstrates that main streets are more than just conduits for traffic and commerce; they are the stages upon which public life is to be celebrated. Enjoy!"

The Parks, Trails, and Health Workbooks, produced by the Center of Disease Control and the National Park Service, is quick guide for incorporating public health considerations in the development and improvement of a park or trail. This tool can help start collaborative discussions about the health benefits of parks and trails and prepare for a health impact assessment.

This self-assessment helps communities identify gaps in their policies, plans, codes, and zoning regulations by asking a series of "Yes" or "No" questions. All communities begin by completing the self-assessment's Revitalize Village and Town Centers section, which gives a baseline indication of smart growth development policies within the jurisdiction. It goes beyond regulatory issues to help communities take stock of their local initiatives, strategies, and plans.