Introduction

We believe that possibility, power, and promise exist in every community. Asset-based community development begins with the gifts of people and their capacity to organize to create the world they want to see.

“I’ve traveled enough to realize there are brilliant people in every community who know solutions. They don’t need saviors, they need allies.”

~ Wab Kinew

Asset-Based Community Development, or ABCD, is simply a name given to the practices of everyday people in community banding together around a common goal or challenge by starting with what they already have. To put it another way, ABCD is the practice of “using what we have to secure what we need.”

Rather than a special technique that anyone invented, asset-based work is a way of seeing and of doing things to create health and address concerns that communities themselves have practiced quite naturally for centuries (especially those who have faced oppression).

More than a rigid methodology or blueprint, ABCD is a lens for focusing on what communities and neighbors can do, rather than their needs or problems. In other words, we focus on “what’s strong, not what’s wrong.” By starting here, we can tap into a vast reservoir of local capacity that often goes ignored and unused. This approach also places community members, rather than outside professionals or agencies, in the driver’s seat as the producers of the change they wish to see.

Of course, every community and community member has needs and challenges. An asset-based approach does not deny this. Instead, we draw upon what “is already there” to address needs or problems, rather than looking to outside professionals, so-called experts or agencies. In other words, we use what we have as a community to fulfill our own needs—and only seek outside help when we have exhausted our own locally-held resources.

The result is greater pride, self-determinism, resilience, and connectivity within our communities, as well as a more effective use of outside resources—when we really need them.

A Brief History

“I’ve traveled enough to realize there are brilliant people in every community who know solutions. They don’t need saviors, they need allies.”

— Wab Kinew

The ABCD approach stems from on-the-ground research conducted by John McKnight and John P. Kretzmann in the early ‘70’s. Their team spent four years interviewing people in neighborhoods across 20 US cities to learn what they had seen make a positive difference in their neighborhood.

Both men were motivated to ask these questions by a common attitude they encountered among academics who studied local communities that these places and people were primarily full of problems and helpless to solve them.

This “learning journey” McKnight and Kretzmann and the stories they gathered revealed what both men had already witnessed through years of grassroots community organizing and thoughtful: that communities are filled with abundant resources, and resourceful people more than capable of defining and coming up with solutions to their own issues. Below is a favorite story of people-powered problem-solving:

In Lafland, Chicago. We went around asking our usual question about what people had done on the block to make things better. One woman responded that the previous summer, when her daughter had become a teenager, [the mother] had started to feel that she was going down the wrong path.

She decided to do something, and she talked to the mother of the girl next door about what to do the next summer with the girls. They made a list of things, and then found 6 other mothers, had a potluck, and over the winter they figured out things to do. They needed a place to do them, so they asked the manager of the park across the street, and he let them use the room on the 2nd floor of the park building for free. There were 8 women, and each would take the girls one day. They would do a project, or invite people in or go on field trips.

By the end of the summer, it was much better than they had anticipated. The girls had learned how to work together. They had each created a flag for each house in the neighborhood. In fact, they had learned more that summer than in the year in school before that. But the best thing was how tight they had all become. The next summer, the fathers on the block did the same thing with the boys, and it was a wonderful success. But now, [the mothers told us], something much more has happened: “We’re a real community. We’ve broken down the lines between the women, between the men, between the women and the men, between adults and teenagers.”

This story of one mother’s “DIY spirit” and the truly effective homegrown solution it produced was reflected in all of the over 400 stories heard by the research team.

The launch of the team’s findings in the book Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets (1993) unleashed an unexpected wave across the the world of people for whom these ideas and stories resonated powerfully. Since this first spark, the ABCD movement has grown organically through the ongoing experimentation, innovation and exchange of everyday practitioners across the world. In the same spirit, ABCD continues to be a flexible set of ideas and practices that evolve with each person and community who picks them up—like you!

While the modern research and language of ABCD have galvanized a powerful shift in community development practices across the world, these ideas and practices are also nothing new. Local people have worked together to creatively solve problems using their own resources and skills since the beginning of history. And today, asset-based ways of living and problem-solving are often vibrantly alive within communities and cultures who face marginalization and oppression from mainstream society—although no one there may use the terminology.

ABCD is nothing new, but rather something that has simply been forgotten in many communities and organizations that serve them.

(For more on the history of ABCD, watch this video of John McKnight.)

John McKnight on ABCD

Watch the below video.