How-To: Make Your Own Seed Bombs
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Spread beauty and resilience by making, sharing, and planting homemade “seed bombs” — clay balls full of seeds, which will sprout flowers wherever they land.
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Need project ideas? Free toolkits? Best practices? Inspiring examples? Find ‘em all here.
How-To: Paint DIY Sidewalk Stencils
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Share messages, calm traffic, engage community members and spread art through simple, temporary street and sidewalk stencils.
Read MoreCommunity Resilience Planning Toolkit
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Communities face a host of unpredictable challenges — stronger storms and heavy rains, pandemics and wires, heat waves and droughts. Yet it’s not easy to engage people in planning for them. What if we could make it a game?
Read MoreCommunity Bingo Game Kit
/Need a fun ice breaker or group activity for a community event? Community bingo is one of the easiest activities you can do. Plus it has a whole bunch of benefits, from building relationships and helping neighbors get to know each other to identifying community skills and assets.
We developed this easy activity as a great starter for community workshops and planning events, but there many ways you can use it. We’ve done versions for resilience and climate change workshops, for neighborhood networking events, for municipal planning and more. Just change the categories and the text to help your group discover all kinds of things about their neighbors.
Download our complete versions (for community asset mapping, neighborhood connections or resilience), print and go!
Want to change it up? You can also download a Microsoft Word template and add your own categories or create a new version.
Community Bingo Kit Instructions
Download and print
Click download above to get our print-ready files for resilience or community bingo. They’re chock-full of good community-related skills and assets. Print on paper or cardstock — you can even print two to a page if you want to walk the sustainability talk.
(Or customize)
If you want to add your own categories or design a bingo game tailored to a different topic, download the Word file instead and click on each square to add your text. Try one for school or education planning, for food and farm events, for climate and energy, or whatever floats your boat.
Plan your event.
This works well for groups of many sizes, from about 10 up to 100 or more. If you have a small group size, you might need to let people fill in the same name for more than one square. At a community meeting, set aside at least 10 minutes for people to do this activity, or hand out cards on the way in and let people fill them out as they mingle and get settled.
Make it worthwhile.
Believe it or not, there may be a few people out there who are NOT chomping at the bit to play bingo or are reluctant to get all friendly and talk to their neighbors. Prizes will help get them in the game — even small ones. Bonus points for giving away community-related swag: try seed packets, first aid kits, or coupons to a downtown shop.
Make it snappy.
Another way to get people moving and stay on track: timers. Timers offer instant motivation; as soon as you show them a ticking clock, people will be off and running.
Start your asset map.
This activity can be just plain fun, but why waste all the info that people gather? Collect the sheets and at the end and you’ll have the start of an inventory or asset map of community skills.