ABCD: Creating a Climate of Possibility
Focusing too much on the problems of a community makes it seem like residents are helpless victims who can’t take charge of their own lives. It implies that help can only come from the outside, which then prevents community members from defining their own future. Asset-based community development (ABCD) stands this narrative on its head.
Always with Them Negative Waves
Not to be a downer, but we humans tend to be a negative bunch.
The reason for this is simple: our brains have evolved to prioritize things that could threaten our lives over things that could help us thrive. In the face of survival, thriving seems like a fringe benefit. The title of a famous research paper puts it much more elegantly: Bad Is Stronger Than Good.
This way of looking at life is hardwired into us, and it shows up everywhere. Researchers, for example, looked at 2.5 million golf putts. They found that pro golfers perform much better when they putt to avoid a bogey compared to when they putt to achieve a birdie.
Put simply, the threat of a bad outcome motivates us more than the possibility of a good outcome. This is true for us whether we’re playing golf on manicured lawns or trying to survive in the wilderness.
The Problem Experts and the Expert Problem
We’re no different when it comes to health.
Well-intentioned folk working in non-profit and philanthropic organizations, government agencies, and universities have spent decades documenting and explaining in detail all the things that are ‘wrong’ within impoverished and marginalized communities.
‘Higher rates of chronic disease.’ ‘Closer proximity to polluting facilities.’ ‘Increased risk of substance abuse.’ The list goes on. Studies, reports, dashboards…. an endless array of sources will tell you how communities aren’t doing so well.
Not to say that documenting the problems isn’t vitally important. Of course, it is! But there are two big problems with a disproportionate emphasis on the problems alone.
First, it is demeaning. Focusing on the problems casts community members as victims – and victims are often seen as people who can’t take charge of their own lives. Second, it is patronizing. Because if you can’t take charge of your life, then you can’t make decisions for yourself. And if you’re helpless, then you need someone else to help you.
Communities defined as victims then become passive clients (or consumers) who must depend on the services of outside providers. In other words, communities stop defining who they are. Others do it for them.
Those defining the solutions for the community are mostly college-educated experts who hold master's and doctorate degrees. After all, complex problems require expert solutions; and, as we wrote earlier, college education has become a shorthand for expertise in the United States.
There’s a reason why this has come about. American society has largely accepted inequality. Instead of sharing the nation’s immense wealth, the idea was that everyone should have equal opportunity to rise and fall within our unequal society. The key to rising, we’ve been told, was education: ‘Earn a college degree to get ahead’. A result of this is that academic ability has come to dominate our view of intelligence. Much of American society today believes that smart can only mean book smart.
Credit: Ricardo Levins Morales
There is absolutely nothing wrong with going to college. But the problem is that no matter how well-educated you are, you’ll always arrive at an incomplete picture of a community if you only focus on the bad things. Problems are only part of the truth, and the only way to arrive at the whole truth is to ask community members about the complete and rich reality of their lives. They are experts, too.
The irony here is that our narrow view of what it means to be smart ignores the expertise of community members. After all, a main indicator of living in a marginalized community is that you probably don’t have a college degree.
As the late education guru Sir Ken Robinson said, “human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability.” Yet, “many brilliant people think they're not [brilliant] because they've been judged against this particular view of the mind.”
Asset-Based Community Development
What’s the solution then?
Rather than positioning philanthropists, non-profit employees, government officials, and academics as the only expert problem-solvers, we should make sure that the first-hand experts – members of the community – have the support they need to define their own solutions and their own future.
To do that, we need to stop seeing problems everywhere. Instead, we should recognize the gifts, skills, and capacities (other than just college degrees) that community residents have. This was John McKnight’s vision when he developed the methods of asset-based community development, or ABCD.
In the late 60s, following a career in civil service and community organizing, McKnight accepted a position at the new Center for Urban Affairs at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
McKnight explained that the research looking at low-income communities at the time was about collecting data on the deficits of the community. This “led [the researchers] to think about the neighborhood as though there was nothing there that was useful.”
“That offended me, frankly,” he said. Seeing communities as “broken places full of broken people” made him angry, and so he decided to use his new university position to research “what was there” in the communities instead of what wasn’t.
McKnight and his colleague John P. “Jody” Kretzmann spent four years during the 80s researching community-building initiatives in hundreds of neighborhoods. The result of their expansive work is summarized in their 1993 book titled Building Communities Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets.
The book is a collection of guides and principles that can help communities map out what strengths and assets they already have in order to develop their community. The authors write that “asset-based community development is intended to affirm, and to build upon the remarkable work already going on in neighborhoods across the country.”
The book addresses a community’s major categories of assets (individuals, citizens' associations, and local institutions), and provides approaches to map and develop those assets. The book is simple, yet powerful.
The authors also suggest a new approach to institutions supporting communities. McKnight and Kretzmann explain that “focusing on the assets of lower income communities does not imply that these communities do not need additional resources from the outside. Rather, this guide simply suggests that outside resources will be much more effectively used if the local community is itself fully mobilized and invested, and if it can define the agendas for which additional resources must be obtained.”
This is a critical observation. The point of ABCD isn’t that diagnosing the problem is bad or that outside support isn’t desirable. This is not at all the case. Philanthropic, governmental, academic, and non-profit organizations have a big role to play in understanding the issues and supporting communities.
But it’s important to appreciate that the “very processes by which wealth is accumulated are those that produce poverty in the first place,” as the global inequality expert Jason Hickel points out. In other words, “the accumulation that sustains charity comes from processes that cause the very problems they purport to solve.” This makes it clear that meaningful and lasting community development must come from the communities themselves, rather than from outsiders who are often part of the problem.
Calls for re-designing philanthropy and the non-profit world begin with that acknowledgment. This is as true for our Data Across Sectors for Health initiative as it is for any other well-intentioned funding program. Otherwise, McKnight and Kretzmann warn, “outside resources will largely be wasted if the internal capacity of the community is not developed.”
Therefore, the challenge for philanthropists, non-profit experts, government officials, and academics is to create an environment where communities can set their own agendas and build on what they already have. Borrowing from Sir Ken Robinson, “The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility. If you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you completely did not anticipate and couldn't have expected.”