A Path Toward Finding and Mobilising a Community’s Assets
By John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight
The Traditional Path – A Needs-Driven Dead End
For most Americans, the names ‘South Bronx’ or ‘South Central Los Angeles,’ or even ‘Public Housing’ call forward a rush of images. It is not surprising that these images are overwhelmingly negative. They are images of crime and violence, of joblessness and welfare dependency, of gangs and drugs and homelessness, of vacant land and buildings. They are images of needy and problematic and deficient neighbourhoods populated by needy and problematic and deficient people.
These images, which can be conceived as a kind of mental ‘map’ of the neighbourhood often convey part of the truth about the actual conditions of a troubled community. But they are not regarded as part of the truth; they are regarded as the whole truth. Once accepted as the whole truth about troubled neighbourhoods, this ‘needs’ map determines how problems are to be addressed, through deficiency-oriented policies and programmes. Public, private and non-profit service systems, often supported by university research and foundation funding, translate the programmes into local activities that teach people about the nature and extent of their problems, and the value of services as the answer to those problems. As a result, many low income urban neighbourhoods are now environments of service where behaviours are affected because residents come to believe that their well-being depends upon being a client. They begin to see themselves as people with special needs that can only be met by outsiders. They become consumers of services, with no incentive to be producers. Consumers of services focus vast amounts of creativity and intelligence on the survival-motivated challenge of outwitting the ‘system’ or on finding ways – in the informal or illegal economy – to bypass the system entirely.
There is nothing natural or inevitable about the process that leads to the creation of client neighbourhoods. In fact, it is important to note how little power local neighbourhood residents have to affect the pervasive nature of the deficiency model, mainly because a number of society’s most influential institutions have themselves developed a stake in maintaining that focus. For example, much of the social science research produced by universities is designed to collect and analyse data about problems. Much of the funding directed to lower income communities is based on the problem-oriented data collected in ‘needs surveys’, a practice emulated by government human service agencies. Finally, the needs map often appears to be the only neighbourhood guide used by members of the mass media, whose appetite for the violent and the spectacularly problematic story seems insatiable. All of these major institutions combine to create a wall between lower income communities and the rest of society – a wall of needs which, ironically enough, is not built on hatred but (at least partly) on the desire to ‘help’.
The fact that the deficiency orientation represented by the needs map constitutes our only guide to lower income neighbourhoods has devastating consequences for residents. We have already noted one of the most tragic – that is, residents themselves begin to accept that map as the only guide to the reality of their lives. They think of themselves and their neighbours are fundamentally deficient, victims incapable of taking charge of their lives and of their community’s future. But other consequences flow as well from the power of the needs map. For example:
- Viewing a community as a nearly endless list of problems and needs leads directly to the much lamented fragmentation of efforts to provide solutions. It also denies the basic community wisdom which regards problems as tightly intertwined, as symptoms in fact of the breakdown of a community’s own problem-solving capabilities.
- Targeting resources based on the needs map directs funding not to residents but to service providers, a consequence not always either planned for or effective.
- Making resources available on the basis of the needs map can have negative effects on the nature of community leadership. If, for example, one measure of effective leadership is the ability to attract resources, then local leaders are, in effect, being forced to denigrate their neighbours and their community by highlighting their problems and deficiencies, and by ignoring their capacities and strengths.
- Providing resources on the basis of the needs map underlines the perception that only outside experts can provide real help. Therefore, the relationships that count most for local residents are no longer those inside the community, those neighbour-to-neighbour links of mutual support and problem solving. Rather, the most important relationships are those that involve the expert, the social worker, the health provider, the funder. Once again the glue that binds communities is lost.
- Reliance on the needs map as the exclusive guide to resource gathering virtually ensures the inevitable deepening of the cycle of dependence: problems must always be worse than last year, or more intractable than other communities, if funding is to be renewed.
- At best, reliance on the needs map as the sole policy guide will ensure a maintenance and survival strategy targeted at isolated individual clients, not a development plan that can involve the energies of entire community.
- Because the needs-based strategy can guarantee only survival, and can never lead to serious change or community development, this orientation must be regarded as one of the major causes of hopelessness that pervades discussions about the future of low income neighbourhoods. If maintenance and survival are the best we can provide, what sense can it make to invest in the future?
The Alternate Path: Capacity-Focused Development
If even some of these negative consequences follow from our total reliance upon the needs map, an alternative approach becomes imperative. The alternative path, very simply, leads toward the development of policies and activities based on the capacities, skills and assets of lower income people and their neighbourhoods.
In addition to the problems associated with the dominant deficiency model, at least two more factors argue for shifting to a capacity-oriented emphasis. First, all the historic evidence indicates that significant community development takes place only when local community people are committed to investing themselves and their resources in the effort. This observation explains why communities are never built from the top down, or from the outside in.
The second reason for emphasising the development of the internal assets of local urban neighbourhoods is that the prospect for outside help is bleak indeed. Even in areas designated as Enterprise Zones, the odds are long that large scale, job-providing industrial or service corporations will be locating in these neighbourhoods. Nor is it likely, in the light of continuing budget constraints, that significant new inputs of federal money will be forthcoming soon. It is increasingly futile to wait for significant help to arrive from outside the community. The hard truth is that development must start from within the community and, in most of our urban neighbourhoods, there is no other choice.
Creative neighbourhood leaders across the country have begun to recognise this hard truth, and have shifted their practices accordingly. They are discovering that wherever there are effective community development efforts, those efforts are based upon an understanding, or map, of the community’s assets, capacities and abilities. It is clear that even the poorest neighbourhood is a place where individuals and organisations represent resources on which to rebuild. The key to neighbourhood regeneration, then, is to locate all of the available local assets, to begin connecting them with one another in ways that multiply their power and effectiveness, and to begin harnessing those local institutions that are not yet available for local development purposes.
This entire process begins with the construction of a new ‘map’. Once this guide to capacities has replaced the old one containing only needs and deficiencies, the regenerating community can begin to assemble its strengths into new combinations, new structures of opportunity, new sources of income and control, and new possibilities for production.
The Assets of a Community: Individuals, Associations, Institutions
Each community boasts a unique combination of assets upon which to build its future. A thorough map of those assets would begin with an inventory of the gifts, skills and capacities of the community’s residents. Household by household, building by building, block by block, the capacity mapmakers will discover a vast and often surprising array of individual talents and productive skills, few of which are being mobilised for community-building purposes. The basic truth about the ‘giftedness’ of every individual is particularly important to apply to persons who often find themselves marginalised by communities. It is essential to recognise the capacities, for example, of those who have been labelled mentally handicapped of disabled, or those who have been marginalised because they are too old, or too young, or too poor. In a community whose assets are being fully recognised and mobilised, these people too will be part of the action, not as clients or recipients of aid, but as full contributors to the community-building process.
In addition to mapping the gifts and skills of individuals, and of households and families, the committed community builder will compile an inventory of citizen’s associations. These associations, less formal and much less dependent on paid staff than are formal institutions, are the vehicles through which citizens in the US assemble to solve problems, or to share common interests and activities. It is usually the case that the depth and extent of associational life in any community is vastly underestimated. This is particularly true of lower income communities. In fact, however, though some parts of associational life may have dwindled in very low income neighbourhoods; most communities continue to harbour significant numbers of associations with religious, cultural, athletic, recreational and other purposes. Community builders soon recognise that these groups are indispensable tools for development, and that many of them can be stretched beyond their original purposes and intentions to become full contributors to the development process.
Beyond the individuals and local associations that make up the asset base of communities are all of the more formal institutions which are located in the community. Private businesses; public institutions such as schools, libraries, parks, police and fire stations; non profits institutions such as hospitals and social service agencies – these organisations make up the most visible and formal part of a community’s fabric. Accounting for them in full, and enlisting them in the process of community development, is essential to the success of the process. For community builders, the process of mapping the institutional assets of the community will often be much simpler than that of making an inventory involving individuals and associations. But establishing within each institution a sense of responsibility for the health of the local community, along with mechanisms that allow communities to influence and even control some of aspects of the institution’s relationships with its local neighbourhood, can prove much more difficult. Nevertheless, a community that has located and mobilised its entire base of assets will clearly feature heavily involved and invested local institutions.
An Alternative Community Development Path: Asset Based, Internally Focused, Relationship Driven
Asset-based community development can be defined by three simple, interrelated characteristics:
- Asset-Based. We start with what is present in the community, the capacities of its residents and workers, the associational and institutional base of the area – not with what is absent, or with what is problematic, or with what the community needs.
- Internally Focused. We concentrate first of all upon the agenda building and problem-solving capacities of local residents, associations and institutions. This is to stress the primacy of local definition, investment, creativity, hope and control.
- Relationship Driven. We need to constantly build and rebuild the relationships between and among local residents, local associations and local institutions.
Skilled community organisers and effective community developers already recognise the importance of relationship building. For it is clear that the strong ties which form the basis for community-based problem solving have been under attack. The forces driving people apart are many and frequently cited – increasing mobility rates, separation of work and residence, mass media, segregation by race and age not least from the point of view of lower income communities, increasing dependence upon outside, professionalised helpers.
Because of these factors, the sense of efficacy based on interdependence, the idea that people can count on their neighbours and neighbourhood resources for support and strength has weakened. For community builders who are focused on assets, rebuilding these local relationships offers the most promising route toward successful community development.
