Knowing the community's strengths makes it easier to understand what kinds of programs or initiatives might be possible to address the community's needs. You can't fully understand the community without identifying its assets.Improvement efforts are more effective, and longer-lasting, when community members dedicate their time and talents to changes they desire.Identifying and mobilizing community assets enables community residents to gain control over their lives.Therefore, the resources for change must come from within each community. External resources (e.g., federal and state money) or grants may not be available.They can be used as a foundation for community improvement.Living a good life depends on whether those capacities can be used, abilities expressed and gifts given." Why should you identify community assets?
"Every single person has capacities, abilities and gifts. One student of communities, John McKnight, has noted: This suggests that everyone in the community can be a force for community improvement if only we knew what their assets were, and could put them to use. Everyone has some skills or talents, and everyone can provide knowledge about the community, connections to the people they know, and the kind of support that every effort needs - making phone calls, stuffing envelopes, giving people information, moving equipment or supplies - whatever needs doing. You and everyone else in the community are potential community assets.It can be a business that provides jobs and supports the local economy.It can be a community service that makes life better for some or all community members - public transportation, early childhood education center, community recycling facilities, cultural organization.Or it might be a public place that already belongs to the community - a park, a wetland, or other open space. It might also be an unused building that could house a community hospice, or a second floor room ideal for community meetings. It can be a physical structure or place - a school, hospital, church, library, recreation center, social club.The firefighter who risks his life to keep the community safe. It can be a person - Residents can be empowered to realize and use their abilities to build and transform the community. The stay-at-home mom or dad who organizes a playgroup.A community asset (or community resource, a very similar term) is anything that can be used to improve the quality of community life. We'll also show how they can be harnessed to meet community needs and to strengthen the community as a whole. So in this section, we will focus on identifying community assets and resources. To draw upon a community's assets, we first have to find out what they are. Those assets and strengths can be used to meet those same community needs they can improve community life.
Every community has needs and deficits that ought to be attended to.īut it is also possible to focus on assets and strengths - emphasizing what the community does have, not what it doesn't. Many community organizations focus on the needs or deficits of the community.
Toolbox for keynote review how to#
Learn how to identify community assets and resources, and how to engage them in the community change effort.
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