The Know Your Region Practitioner's Guide (newly updated for 2009) offers the step-by-step curriculum designed to walk development practitioners through the process of developing effective regional development strategies.  This curriculum reviews the following topics:

1. Framework: This module explores the changing nature of the global economy, implications for the role of development practitioners, and basic characteristics of effective regional plans.
2. Leading the Planning Effort:  This module is designed to provide practitioners and policy makers with the tools and resources to effectively lead development planning efforts from a regional perspective.  This module reviews various types of regional leaders, methods for organizing and communicating and strategies for overcoming obstacles.
3. Detecting Regional Advantage: This module is designed to teach practitioners how to consider and assess regional advantages in their own community.  The module discusses how a region’s economic base, talent pool, innovative environment, and business development interact to form the building blocks of regional competitive advantage.
4. Formulating Strategies: This module builds upon the lessons provided in the previous modules to provide concrete tools for understanding and prioritizing strategies that can be utilized to overcome the challenges posed by recent global changes. Also included is a sub-module -Linking Workforce Development and Economic Development: this case study examines how global changes have transformed the requirements of the workforce development system and necessitate greater collaboration among workforce development and economic development initiatives. 
5. Executing Your Plan: This module culminates the information presented in this curriculum by providing tools to assist you in understanding how to evaluate and assess your development initiative.

In addition to this comprehensive curriculum, the Know Your Region Practitioner Manual offers information compiles the vast resources available on the Know Your Region website, including: information on funding sources, additional resources, and case studies.

The Know Your Region Instructor’s Manual (also newly updated for 2009) offers a rich resource for development practitioners interested in delivering this information to others in their community.  The manual provides the step-by-step curriculum for development professionals and also offers insight from the curriculum designers on how to effectively distribute the modules. Additionally, the Know Your Region Instructor’s Manual provides resources on funding, additional information on resources that support the content in each of the modules, and case studies.

For those still requiring access to the 2007 curriculum, the older manuals can be accessed here:

• 2007 Participant's Manual (pdf)
• 2007 Instructor's Manual (pdf)