Asset-Based Community Development

Mobilizing an Entire Community

Across the country, community builders are refocusing attention on capacities and assets, and are inventing new methods for mobilizing neighborhood residents. Most often, however, these efforts concentrate on one or two local assets, generating new relationships and influence for a particular school, or church, or park, or community organization. Before us lies the challenge of a more comprehensive asset-based strategy, one which might involve virtually the entire community in the complex process of regeneration

What might such a process look like? What are the basic building blocks which, when fully mapped, would constitute a more or less complete inventory of a community's assets? How might these building blocks be combined into a strong and dynamic community building strategy? How do the disciplines of community organizing, community economic development and community-based planning inform this whole community strategy? Who might be appropriate conveners for this process, providing it with the leadership which invites investment and vision?

Five Steps Toward Whole Community Mobilization

The following five steps do not presume to add up to a complete blueprint for asset-based community development. Rather, they are intended to identify some of the major challenges facing community builders, and to point at least toward the beginning of a walk down the path that would mobilize an entire community's assets around a vision and a plan. Such a path would cover at least these five basic steps:

• Mapping Assets
  Mapping completely the capacities and assets of individuals, citizens' associations and local institutions.

• Building Relationships
  Building relationships among local assets for mutually beneficial problem-solving within the community.

• Mobilizing Assets
  Mobilizing the community's assets fully for economic development and information sharing purposes.

• Convening the Community
  Convening as broadly representative a group as possible for the purposes of building a community vision and plan.

• Leveraging Outside Resources
  Leveraging activities, investments and resources from outside the community to support asset-based, locally defined development.

Taken together, these five steps begin to point the way down a community building path which is, in fact, asset-based, internally focussed and relationship driven. Let us examine each of these steps in a little more detail.

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