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Helping Communities Work BetterAsset-Based Community Development
Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) is a strategy for community building developed at Northwestern University's Institute for Policy Research by John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight. The ABCD approach focuses on discovering, increasing and mobilizing a community's capacities and assets, as compared to more traditional approaches that focus on a community's needs, deficiencies and problems. The core of the approach is creating asset maps or inventories of what is already present in the community - the gifts, skills and resources of individuals, associations and institutions - and in order to build relationships and mobilize resources for the community's development. While this approach was developed primarily for use by low-income neighborhoods, it can be used in any community development activity in which organizers value an asset-based, internally focused, relationship driven approach.
www.northwestern.edu/ipr/abcd.htmlCitizen Deliberative Councils
Citizen Deliberative Councils are a category (so-named by Tom Atlee,
www.co-intelligence.org) of structured, deliberative processes for community participation and decision-making. These processes include citizen juries, groups of 10-20 people who select and cross-examine diverse experts on a particular topic or issue and then make recommendations to convening authorities; various forms of citizen consensus councils, including wisdom councils; and, deliberative polling, in which citizens are surveyed before and after deliberation to examine shifts in thinking. Atlee identifies a number of common characteristics among these approaches, including face-to-face interaction; diverse, democractic selection and makeup; use of facilitated dialogue; the consensus goal; and, reporting to concerned officials.Listening Projects
Listening projects have been used since the early 1980s to organize local communities. Trained interviewers go door-to-door asking powerful questions about local issues. Their purpose is less to gather data (although that is also a part of it), than to bring the issues to life in the minds and hearts of those being interviewed, and to generate change not by telling but by listening. Often, both interviewers and interviewees come to understandings or possibilities they hadn't foreseen, with many interviewees asking how they can take action. Literature, training and inspiration is available from Rural Southern Voice for Peace (RSVP), 1898 Hannah Branch Road, Burnsville, NC 28714, (828) 675-5933, fax (828) 675-9335, email: rsvp028714@yahoo.com. This initiative is another referenced by Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute,
www.co-intelligence.org
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