Community Commons is an interactive mapping, networking, and learning utility for the broad-based healthy, sustainable, and livable communities’ movement. Learn more about the Commons here.

Formed in the spring of 2010, Advancing the Movement (ATM) is a distributed network of leaders from communities, philanthropy, government agencies, and the private, academic, voluntary and civic sectors - serving across fields, political perspectives and issues foci - collaborating on policy, systems and environmental changes for a healthier, more equitable and prosperous United States of America.

The mission of ATM is to increase and sustain the impact of multi-sector local, state and regional initiatives working towards a vision of healthy people in healthy places.

Learn more about Advancing the Movement here.

Register or log-into the Commons. From the Home page click "Add or Edit an Initiative Profile". If your place-based initiative meets the parameters suggested click "Yes" and proceed to complete your profile. Once complete, your information will be reviewed by the Commons team within 48 hours and your profile will be placed on the Map of the Movement. You will be alerted via e-mail once this has occurred. You can also add a profile by visiting the Map of the Movement under Connect>Initiatives. You will see an "Add Initiative" button at the top of the map. From there, the process is the same.

There are a couple of ways to edit your profile. One is to log in and visit your profile on the Map of the Movement under Connect>Initiatives. On your profile page you will see a link in the top right corner to Edit. Another option is from your logged-in home page you will see a button titled "Add or Edit a Place-Based Initiative Profile" on the right. Click it and you will be prompted to agree to the parameters of the place-based initiatives. You will then see a small box asking if you want to add a new profile or edit an existing profile. If you choose the latter you will see a dropdown menu listing the profiles you can edit. Select one and edit.

Does your local initiative:

Work together through a coalition or partnership that involves multiple organizations, sectors and community perspectives (not for a single organization)?
Focus on the underlying factors that determine the health of people and places (e.g. healthy environments for physical activity, access to nutritious foods, healthy schools/workplaces/childcare sites, tobacco free environments, civic and social environments that encourage inclusion relationships)?

Focus on long-term change (not a single short-term project or program)?

If yes, we'd love to see your initiative on the Commons!

When viewing a profile you will see a Follow button in the upper right-hand corner next to Print. If you click Follow you will see that issue listed under “Favorites” in your personal profile. Visit this area by clicking on your name at the top of the page to view all of your favorite profiles at any time.

Go to Connect>Initiatives and click Find Initiative in the upper right corner of the map. There you can narrow the points on the map down by cohorts, focus areas and strategie, funders and states. On the upper right side of the screen click Show Key to list the initiatives meeting your criteria.

You will notice a Print button in the upper right-hand corner of the initiative profile.

Go to Connect>Initiatives to see the Map of the Movement. Once there click Find Initiative to expand the search options. You can type in the Search Profile box to search profiles referencing that word.

The Search Initiatives box is searching the points displayed on the map. So you will need to check at least one of the filter boxes below the box to see results.

Community Commons uses #hashtags to help users find conversations and keep them organized. To use this system simply place # (pound sign) in front of keyword(s) in your post. If the keyword is actully two words like "complete streets" combine them like this: #completestreets.

We'd love to hear from you if you are interested in moderating a group. We work closely with moderators to select qualified individuals to lead active discussions.

Follow our Facebook page here.

Follow our Twitter feed here.

News items on Community Commons are curated by the Community Commons team. We'd love to hear your suggestions. Please suggest a News item here.

Features on Commons are curated by the Community Commons team. We'd love to hear your suggestions. Please suggest a Feature here.

The Make a Map link allows you to create maps of thousands of public data layers provided by The Center for Applied Research and Environmental Systems, or CARES. You can explore these data layers, overlay them to examine gaps, patterns or simply to learn more about your community. You can print and save these map images for your own use. Additionally, CARES provides access to analytic tools to query the data and the ability to download results into Excel for offline work and exploration.

We've created the starter maps to help you get a jump start on using the interactive mapping tools. Starter maps can be zoomed to any location in the US with the Address Search tool. Once you open the map you can re-center it on your area and make other changes to suit your needs. Visit the starter maps here.

At this time, no. Some of users may have access to a CARES custom learning system with this additional functionality. If you have questions about this feature, please contact us.

Great! Let us know.

You will see info buttons listed next to the layers both when you add a layer to the map and when you are in the interactive mapping environmant. Click it to learn about the source and vintage of the layer.

Visit the CARES public data list here.

Yes, under Visualize>Map Widgets you will see two options to download widgets of the profile map for your site. One option provides the entire profile map. The other option allows you to customize the widget to show only a specific cohort. Let us know if you have other widget needs.

At this point these actions are handled by the Community Commons curation team. Please notify us of important dates via the Feedback page. We will roll out expanded functionality for the Calendar in the near future. This tool can be particularly useful for funders who can post grant application deadlines for users on Community Commons.

Visit the log-in area and click "Forgot Password." Enter your username or e-mail and an e-mail will be sent to you with both your username and a link to reset your password.

Please let us know and we'lll resolve the issue as soon as possible.

Once logged in click on your name at the top of the page. Then click Profile. You will see a link to Change Photo below the primary navigation. Choose a file and click Upload Image.