About the Strong Communities Competition

CommunityMatters and Ashoka’s Changemakers are partnering to offer the Strong Communities: Engaging Citizens, Strengthening Place, Inspiring Change competition!

Citizens, practitioners and elected officials can enter innovative, replicable, sustainable projects and ideas to steer change and take charge of the future of their communities. We want to hear from an array of voices, and most importantly, we want to create a community of people who come together to celebrate, collaborate, and share experiences.

From June 16 through August 11, 2010, we’re asking people to share their big, crazy, “knock-your-socks-off” ideas, and to inspire us with the transformational projects that are happening in towns and neighborhoods across the country. In particular, we’re looking for interdisciplinary approaches where different people, organizations and fields come together to learn from each other and collectively solve problems by creating a shared vision of a strong community.

Congratulations to our 24 semi-finalists, selected from across the U.S. and Canada for their inspiring work in the arts, sustainability, health, community planning, and other fields.

Our judges will now select eight finalists, each of whom will be invited to CommunityMatters ’10 to showcase their work. Entries will be judged on innovation, social impact and sustainability. Online voting will begin a week before the conference and live voting will continue during the conference; we’ll announce three winners at the conference closing.

Find us live at www.changemakers.com/strongcommunities.

Prizes

Early Entry Prize: The best entry submitted by 5PM EDT, July 14, 2010 will be eligible to win USD $500. Learn more about the early entry winner, Troy Bike Rescue!

ReTweet Prizes: From June 16, 2010 through August 11, 2010, there will be a drawing every Monday for a ReTweet prize. Any person with a Twitter account that re-tweets a specific message from @CommunityMttrs with hashtag #strongcomms during the previous week will be automatically entered to win a prize valued at or below USD $20.

Grand Prizes: Three winners will be chosen via online public voting. Each winner will receive a USD $5,000 grand prize.