Abstract: While community-based organizations (CBO)s increasingly adopt GIS, many have serious misconceptions on what GIS can and cannot do and what is needed to make effective use of it. This article describes the problems and opportunities in utilizing GIS as a tool for enabling participatory planning in three neighborhoods in Chicago. It illustrates the process of creating a useful community GIS database and ways to augment GIS with other tools to foster public participation. Through three years of extensive experience in implementing a community GIS, a planning team at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that GIS has significant limitations that could be addressed by integrating other high-tech and traditional tools. Following Shiffer’s work, the team incorporated innovative multimedia and 3D modeling, and inspired by Hopkins’s work we augmented GIS with electronic sketchboards. We also utilized the Internet to extend the reach of the community GIS. This combination of tools empowered residents to visualize, evaluate, and participate in revitalizing their neighborhoods. We hope that the experiences described in this paper will assist others who want to utilize GIS in community planning.