Discovering Community Power: A Guide to Mobilizing Local Assets and Your Organization’s Capacity

Posted by on July 9, 2007

From: Ashwani Vasishth

http://www.smartgrowth.org/library/articles.asp?art=2299

Discovering Community Power

Discovering Community Power: A Guide to Mobilizing Local Assets and Your Organization’s Capacity is a community-building workbook from the Asset-Based Community Development Institute (ABCD Institute) School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University.

This publication is designed to help organizations

1. Strengthen its own organization by enhancing connections with the community’s assets.
2. Strengthen the community by investing in the community’s assets.
3. Strengthen current and future community based projects, activities, and proposals.

The ABCD Institute’s experience indicates that proposals that connect with and engage a wide range of community resources are more effective than those that involve only the staff of the lead organization. The Institute also believes that non-profit organizations are much more powerful community actors when they are not exclusively focused on needs, problems, and deficiencies but are effectively connected to the resources, or assets, of the local community.

37 pages (700kb); available online as a PDF document at the resource link below.

Resource: http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/abcd/kelloggabcd.pdf