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The Community Action for a Renewed Environment (CARE) Resource Guide

The Community Action for a Renewed Environment (CARE) Resource Guide is a tool that will enable users to navigate EPA's Web site and find information about toxics in their local communities. This page offers an introduction to the Resource Guide; additionally, users are given a choice of either viewing the guide online or downloading a copy of the guide in PDF format. Both of these options are available through links on the page below.

 
Do a Keyword Search of the Resource Guide: 

Introduction to the CARE Resource Guide

This guide will help you navigate the EPA's Web site and find information that can help you improve the environment in your community. The Resource Guide was developed for EPA’s Community Action for a Renewed Environment (CARE) program. In the CARE program, EPA works with communities to help them come together collaboratively to investigate the toxics problems in their communities and ultimately use EPA voluntary programs to reduce emissions of toxics in the community. The goals of CARE are to reduce risks and empower communities to become stewards of their own environment.

The Resource Guide is designed to help communities in the CARE program, but it can be used by anyone interested in any aspect of working with communities. In the CARE program communities go through a multi-step process: getting organized, analyzing risks, reducing risks, tracking progress. The Resource Guide enables you to find the on-line resources that can help communities through every step of the process as they move from getting organized to becoming stewards of their own environment. The first four parts of the Resource Guide track the Community for a Renewed Environment (CARE) process. They are roughly organized in order of the steps a community would go through as it moves through that process:

Stage in the CARE Process Part of the Resource Guide
The community, in partnership with EPA, creates a collaborative problem solving stakeholder group made up of the various stakeholders in the community. Part I Getting Started and Building Partnerships
The stakeholder group assesses the community’s toxic exposure problems Part II Understanding the Risks in Your Community
Partnering with EPA, the Stakeholder Group selects and funds projects designed to reduce risk and improve the environment. Part III Methods to Reduce Your Exposure
The Group tracks progress, evaluates programs, and develops new way to bring funds and new partners into the community to fund further risk reduction measures. Part IV Tracking Progress and Moving Forward
The Resource Guide has two additional sections to that can help someone in any stage of the process:

Part V Complete Process Resources: Sites That Have Information on the Whole Process
Part VI Learning from the Experience of Others: Case Studies

There are a number of sections in each part. Each section has one or more entries. Each entry has a title, a Web address and a short description of the material. In general, the entries are organized from tools that are more generally applicable and/or multi-media to entries that have more limited applicability and/or discuss a single media (air, water, waste, etc.) . We have tried to keep information about a single media together within a section. We hope that the Guide will help you find the information you need quickly and easily.

Since the Resource Guide was developed to help you navigate EPA’s Web site, most of the material can be found on our Web site. However, in order to include some particularly useful information, we did include some material from other federal sources or from sources that we have partnered with to produce the referenced material. While the material varies in its level of difficulty, most items were written to be understandable by the general public and has no special notes. The more technical documents, data sources or computer models are marked for technical audiences and listed together after the more general material.

When you first come to the Guide on-line, you will see it in outline form. If you want to read the information in a section, click on the section title and the material in that section will appear. You can also choose to look at the whole Guide all at once and you can print a copy of the entire Guide or of any one section. In addition you can use the keyword search feature to find all listings that relate to one of our listed key words.

The Guide will be updated regularly with new material added and outdated material deleted. We will do our best to ensure that Web addresses work and are up to date. However, due to the constantly changing nature of the Web we can not ensure that every address will work. We apologize in advance for any difficulty that may cause. If you have any problems, comments or questions with the Guide, the CARE Web site includes a place for you to submit them to us. We hope you find the Guide useful and we wish you the best of luck in your community work.

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