I'm not an ABCD expert at all, but as a former social services and community development guy now working in public health, I find myself having to explain (what I consider to be) fairly basic ideas about the application of ABCD to my new field of work.
I'm quoting belowmy comments to another NING network on Community Health Assessment, but it got me thinking about whether anyone is already applying ABCD explicitly in a public health context. Public health has begun to take on more of a systems perspective with its emphasis on the "Social Determinants of Health," which recognizes what social workers have known for years, that it matters to your (health) outcomes if you're poor, or disenfranchised, or oppressed. But public health still relies pretty strongly on community "needs assessment," and it may take more than just a cultural shift to change that structure of analysis.
So ... (1) what are ABCD experts doing with public health and (2) does my characterization of ABCD ring true for you?
This may look like a semantic issue, but there has been, in the social services field, the idea that "needs assessment" is a deficit-based model which focuses on what is negative about or lacking in a community rather than what is positive about or can be built upon in a community.
Asset-based models of community development (again, not hisorically from a public health perspective) focus on what is working in communities, and builds on that. It can be revolutionary to change your perspective to recognize the good things that are present, even in impoverished or disenfranchised communities, and build upon them. It changes the individuals and insitutions to empowered actors on their own behalf, rather than objectified vitims or recipients of outside aid.
Of course, a proper assessment of a commuity would include strengths AND weaknesses, but we have tended towards the needs in the past, espeically in public health, and are perhaps in greater need of a corrective.
I'm not an expert on asset-based commuity development (ABCD) but I know one of its principle academic architects and an ABCD consultant very well. You can find more on this at http://www.abcdinstitute.org/
updated by @ron-dwyer-voss: 10/25/16 02:06:45PM
