Instead of focusing on a community's needs, deficiencies and problems, Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) helps them become stronger and more self-reliant by discovering, mapping and mobilizing all their local assets. Few people realize how many assets any community has:

• the skills of its citizens, from youth to disabled people, from thriving professionals to starving artists;
• the dedicaton of its citizens associations -- churches, culture groups, clubs, neighborhood associations
• the resources of its formal institutions -- businesses, schools, libraries, community colleges, hospitals, parks, social service agencies.

By the late 1990s, communities around the country were mapping and using these resources in imaginative ways, bringing them out of the closet and into creative synergy with each other, with dramatic results. Asset-based community development has provided leaders and institutions in all sectors with an approach that is relatively cheap, effective and empowering, that avoids paternalism and dependence -- an approach that can be supported by all parts of the political spectrum and initiated at any level of civic life.

RESOURCES

Book

John P. Kretzmann and John L. Mc Knight, Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets (Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, 1993)

Website

http://www.nwu.edu/IPR/abcd.html - The Asset-Based Community Development Institute - contains many more resources

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The original material on this site was posted by Tom Atlee from http://www.co-intelligence.org and may be changed freely.