Week 6: Class Reading Blog (Kretzman and McKnight) - Jeri

In a nutshell, this article asks us to stop focusing on a community’s needs and start focusing on their assets.  Their view is that by focusing on the community’s needs, the people of the community begin to see themselves solely as clients, and to believe that they need someone else to come in and implement a program to fix their problem.  By contrast, a focus on the assets of the community allows the community to invest themselves and their resources into the community, because there is not usually the prospect of someone from outside coming in with large amounts of money.

         The article further discusses the different levels of ‘building blocks’ of the community.  The first level is the assets located and controlled by those that live in the neighborhood.  Examples of those are not just businesses owned within the community (including home-based businesses) but the skills and talents that may not be being used of those living in the community.  This also includes the talents of those they called ‘labeled people’ – the mentally challenged, mentally ill, disabled or elderly.   It also might include associations of businesses or citizens, or cultural or religious organizations.

The second level is the assets located in the neighborhood, but controlled by those outside it.  This would include schools, hospitals and services such as the police, fire departments and libraries.  Other examples would be physical resources such as parks and vacant lots.  It seems odd to think of a vacant lot as a resource instead of blight, but many cities are thinking outside the box to use their vacant lots in creative ways.

The third and least accessible are those assets located outside the neighborhood and controlled by those outside it also.  This includes things such as welfare money, expenditures on public capital improvement and public information.   A few creative community groups have developed different ways to use these funds to benefit their neighborhood in a more asset-focused way.

But once the assets of a community have been catalogued, what then?  How do we translate the list of great things that every neighborhood has a way to use them effectively?  The article ends by discussing examples of community associations or community development organizations.  These organizations involve as many representatives of the community’s first level as possible and use some version of a community inventory to develop strategies to define the future of the neighborhood.  A good example of an inventory to discover the assets of a community is given as an appendix.

         I personally still struggle with, “What then?”  I think you need a strong person from inside the community to be able to take that next step.  After all, for the rebuilding of the community to be something that continues, it needs to be from the community, not an outsider.  So how do we fit in? How much do we do and when do we step aside?