What is the Asset-based Community Development Approach?
ANDARES follows the principles behind the Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) approach, according to which community programs should start from people’s gifts and strengths. This approach sets itself in opposition to a deficit-based approach, which starts by identifying what is lacking or what is needed in the community. We opt for the ABCD approach based on the simple assumption that people who decide to emigrate to another country are by definition strong in many ways: they show courage to face the unknown, they have the wisdom that allows them to make the right decisions as they journey across geographic borders and cultures, they have the knowledge and experience that informs those decisions, and they have a corpus of traditions and beliefs that sustains them in this journey.
At ANDARES, we postulate that the immigrants from Latin America who settle in Oregon precisely carry with them these assets and therefore they are qualified to actively participate in shaping the destiny of their communities. By taking an ABCD approach, the foundation of our work is the recognition and honoring of the assets and the cultural wealth of the Latinx community. In practical terms this is reflected in creating spaces for the expression of those assets and cultural wealth through conversations, storytelling, and arts, and in engaging with communities in participatory action-research processes leading to a critical analysis of their situations, identifying what they would like to do to enrich their quality of life, determining what role they would like to play in implementing community initiatives, and actively engaging in guiding or implementing those initiatives.
The profile image of this post comes from the article “Bristol, A City of Social Action”, published in the Nurture Development website (https://shorturl.at/g5sNp). The article describes the social activism work in the City of Bristol, UK, involving residents in neighborhood improvement initiatives. This is one of the examples that guides the ANDARES agenda.
A few resources on ABCD:
Tamarack Institute. Asset Based Community Development at a Glance. https://shorturl.at/8m2o3
Nurture Development. Asset Based Community Development (ABCD). https://www.nurturedevelopment.org/asset-based-community-development/
American Planning Association. Silver Linings of Asset-Based Community Development. https://shorturl.at/YqqGd
De Paul University. Asset-Based Development Institute. https://resources.depaul.edu/abcd-institute/Pages/default.aspx