Introducing the DASH Asset-Based Community Development Webinar Series

Please join us for a webinar series exploring asset-based community development (ABCD). The first webinar takes place on March 22, 2024. 

What is a community?

That’s a good question. Some might say a community is individuals with talents. Loving families. Neighbors sharing, supporting, and building. Trusted community institutions.

Now, ask the same question again, perhaps from a different group of folks, and you might get a completely different sort of answer. What is a community? Individuals with struggles. Hurting families. Neighbors enduring violence. Threadbare community institutions. 

This is a rather bleak way to describe a community, isn’t it? Yet it is often the lens that government organizations, policymakers, research institutions, and even community-based organizations use when making plans or appeals for support or development.

Now, that first set of responses – that glass-is-half-full point of view – reflects the much more positive Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) lens. ABCD is an approach to community development that prioritizes and protects community agency by guiding community members to build on the strengths and resources that exist within the individuals, groups and affiliations, places, and lore in the community.

While some of these assets are more “official,” such as community centers and clinics, most are informal, shifting, under the radar, or invisible. This asset-focused, community-driven, power-sharing approach represents essential steps toward health equity.

In 2023, DASH produced two practical workbooks about ABCD in collaboration with Darryl Answer of Verge Solutions and Ron Dwyer-Voss of Pacific Community Solutions, both faculty members at DePaul University’s Asset-Based Community Development Institute. The workbooks, Improving Health Equity through ABCD and Using Data to Tell Your Community’s Story, emerged from a 2022 DASH initiative that supported ABCD programs around the country.

Join Us! 

DASH is looking forward to hosting a free four-part webinar series on Asset-Based Community Development, starting this month.

The first webinar will be presented by Darryl and Ron, as well as their DePaul colleague Indigo Bishop, and will draw on DASH’s set of ABCD workbooks as well as other ABCD research and practice.

Registrants will dive into the workbook materials, connect with similar organizations, and learn from peers and presenters. Join us!

Our first webinar takes place on Friday, March 22, 1:30 PM CT, and will include a half hour devoted to Q&A.