[Guide] Building Community Capacity for Dementia Inclusion: An Action Guide

The Building Capacity Project’s Community Action Team (CAT) is excited to announce the project they’ve poured their heart into over the last year and half is ready to go. Building Community Capacity for Dementia Inclusion: An Action Guide is a practical community resource that supports groups and communities looking to address and reduce stigma, and become more inclusive with their activities and programs. The hot-off-the-press guide walks you through the seven key stages involved in adapting an existing program or creating something new and accessible from scratch, starting with building relationships and community engagement, moving through convening community conversations, visioning and planning, and finally, tying it all together with sections focused on implementation, evaluation, and sustainability.

Their short summary report is a great entry point for people interested in learning more about what this guide offers but not quite ready to jump into the work itself. Whereas the full guide offers a more fulsome “deep dive” for groups already rolling up their sleeves to get started. Both documents come with an introductory video available at buildingcapacityproject.com.

The Community Action Team (CAT) is comprised of advocates with lived experience of dementia, BCP community partners, researchers, and project staff from across the country. This team met monthly starting in the summer of 2023 to review the work chapter by chapter, reflecting on how accessible and practical the material was, and collaborating to make the document as inclusive, relevant, and applicable as possible.

The project team marked the guide’s soft launch last week in a special online celebration where they had a chance to acknowledge how powerful the collaborative process was, to think back about all the learnings and insights they took from the process, and to share their excitement about where this work will go from here.

To access the guide, please visit buildingcapacityproject.com, and feel free to get in touch with the BCP team at any point if you have questions or would like to connect.