The Community Capitals Dataset: Quantifying the Community Capitals Framework in the United States

The Community Capitals Framework offers a systematic approach to community development, conceptualizing vibrant communities as the product of a cohesive system derived from built, cultural, financial, human, natural, political, and social capitals. For more than twenty years, the Framework has been successfully applied in both research and practice, but a persistent challenge for both is navigating how to quantify each of the seven capitals. In this article, we propose a novel dataset at the U.S. county-level to address this challenge. We synthesize the literature that has shaped the Community Capitals Framework and narrate a path forward in quantifying each at the county-level using publicly available data. We make this Community Capitals Dataset publicly available to facilitate further use and development of the Community Capitals Framework.