The Orton Family Foundation provides educational resources designed to help preserve the quality of life in rural communities. Recent products are: CommunityViz, which is a community simulation software, and the Community Video Project, an affordable, collaborative effort for community members to create a self-portrait as a foundation for determining its future.

An important addition to these resources is a book entitled Making Community Connections: The Orton Community Mapping Program, by Connie L. Knapp. This book is designed to bring teams of teachers and their students together with community members to study a problem, a resource, a condition - any matter of interest and importance to the community. The schoolwork includes gathering and examining existing information, discovering new facts through field investigation, and mapping the resource using GIS/GPS tools. Not only do the students meet and work with community mentors and experts who participate in the classroom and help with the field studies, they also typically hold public forums to gather input on the resource and their work.

At the end of the semester or project the students hold a public forum to present their work in a variety of forms including video conferences, speeches and presentations, reading of narratives, display of hand-drawn maps, GIS maps, etc. thus providing a body of research to the community which can be used to address immediate concerns and help plan for the future. The mapping program provides a flexible framework to allow students, teachers and communities to discover places and the problems that concern them. It introduces and reaffirms concepts of sustainability and responsibility into the larger perspective of community and classroom discourse.

The book is to function as both template for individual design and a philosophical guide -- addressing the specific needs of any size group with a diversity of budgetary support for a mapping project. It can be purchased here.

To see examples of mapping applications, visit the Institute for Technology Development's Community Mapping Program.