5 credits

Effective community leaders must be familiar with a wide range of tools, strategies, and skills to create sustainable communities. In this course, students examine these elements to learn how leaders build capacity for community change, assess community needs and resources, create community visions, promote stakeholder interest and participation, analyze community problems, and carry out practices and interventions to improve sustainability in communities. They also explore sustainability frameworks and models, and they apply these and other concepts presented in the course to develop a proposal for sustainable community development, focusing on community assessment, stakeholder involvement, and development planning.