Hello ABCD in Action Community,
First off, I want to thank everyone in advance for any assistance you may be able to provide. I am going to try and keep this post short, but apologize if it becomes lengthy.
I was just recently referred to ABCD as a model to use for community development. I am familiar with ABCD as far as what I have been told by my colleague who was the person who originally referred me to it, articles I have found online, and have read a little on Community Network Theory. Overall, very green, so am grateful for any/all pointers.
I am working with a few people in my community on developing a grant proposal to assist with economic development in our rural Native American community. What we are hoping to do is use the ABCD model of building social capital through personal inventory, identifying and inventorying community assets and wealth and hoping it will fit under the grants focus of strengthening "economic infrastructure" which creates awareness, takes personal inventory and gathers knowledge toward economic development. There are a lot of assets and community resources in our area, but they are not always accessed or even acknowledged as wealth within the community. In addition, there are historical as well as current factors that play into this, which we are hoping the ABCD model would help us address.
Right now we are thinking that our main goal of the project would be to identify wealth and economic opportunity creating a network, using Network Theory, one that is interactive and fluid focused on economic development. Some of my questions are: is there Native American (or other underserved/underrepresented) communities that have inventoried their community assets and created a network that led to economic development projects? If an organization were to begin a project of making these types of connections within their community, what would a budget for this project look like? Are there other suggestions for us based upon the limited description I have provided here?
We are very excited to have found ABCD as we believe it is exactly what we need to help with community change. We are continuing our reading/research on the topic, but any insider tips would be wonderful. Please let me know if I need to clarify anything or if there are questions. Many thanks.
Kait
updated by @katherine-hirchak: 04/27/19 04:52:25AM
