For a long time those of us who wanted to help communities engaged in a
standard practice. We spent significant time and energy assessing the needs
of distressed neighborhoods, and then we went about trying to fill those
needs. Along the way we also ignored the quiet strengths of these
communities.
We began to offer programs that tended to reinforce need
rather than build community capacity. We labeled individuals and
communities in a way that made us the heros and them the deficient users of
our charity. In doing this we helped some, but the overall result was a
reversal of our neighborhood economies to reward people being labeled with negative titles and making little progress toward building their own self sufficiency. Fortunately, two sociologists from Northwestern University came along and recognized the negative economy that this needs based focus created in communities. They began to recognize that the most efficient and effective way to heal a community is to focus on its assets. Their <http://www.abcdinstitute.org/> Asset Based Community Development Institute has provided much of the research that underlies our work at Metanoia.
Every group of people you have ever been a part of that has
accomplished something has focused on the assets of each individual in the
group to get something done. This is what we do every day at Metanoia.
Despite the diversity of our programming and holistic nature of our
approach, each of our efforts is held together by a relentless commitment to
discover and grow community assets. These assets are sometimes physical (a vacant building becomes a youth entrepreneurship center, an empty house
becomes a new family home), and they occur in every human who walks through our door (we all have gifts and abilities no matter where we come from or where we are going). We have seen that by luring investment to community assets, we create a change that begins to build on itself. The community begins to redefine itself as gifted and full of capacity rather than
deficient and as this occurs the community gains the capacity to heal
itself. That is the ultimate goal of Asset Based Community Development.
