From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) is a methodology that seeks to uncover and highlight the strengths within communities as a means for sustainable development. The basic tenet is that a capacities-focused approach is more likely to empower the community and therefore mobilize citizens to create positive and meaningful change from within. Instead of focusing on a community's needs, deficiencies and problems, the ABCD approach helps them become stronger and more self-reliant by discovering, mapping and mobilizing all their local assets. Few people realize how many assets any community has:

• the skills of its citizens, from youth to disabled people, from thriving professionals to starving artists;
• the dedicaton of its citizens associations — churches, culture groups, clubs, neighborhood associations
• the resources of its formal institutions — businesses, schools, libraries, community colleges, hospitals, parks, social service agencies.

By the late 1990s, communities around the country were mapping and using these resources in imaginative ways, bringing them out of the closet and into creative synergy with each other, with dramatic results. Asset-based community development has provided leaders and institutions in all sectors with an approach that is relatively cheap, effective and empowering, that avoids paternalism and dependence — an approach that can be supported by all parts of the political spectrum and initiated at any level of civic life.

• Allotment gardens
• Community development
• Community-based participatory research (CBPR)
• Participatory rural appraisal (PRA)
• Searsolin
• Praxis_intervention

• John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight, Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets (Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, 1993)

• Asset-Based Community Development Institute
• Social Leadership Development Course, SEARSOLIN
• Nurture Development- ABCD approach in Ireland http://www.nurturedevelopment.ie/phil_abcd.html
• Praxis Intervention