Understanding Community Assets

1. Niñon Lewis IHI Understanding Community Assets

2. Our Vision…

3. Change Ideas • Three Levels of Activation: • Activating individuals: • Community organizing, storytelling, facilitative leadership • Activating organizations: • Community collaboration and governance • Activating communities • Understanding community assets, participatory decision making

4. Activating at the Individual Level • What Activation Might Look Like: • Single mother trained as a community health worker coaching a newly pregnant woman about opportunities for and importance of prenatal care. • Local Boys and Girls Club volunteers spreading the word to residents about an upcoming community listening session around a health need. • The Role: • Understanding how they influence shared community goals • Sharing personal stories and an urgency for change • Building up leaders around them • Participating in readily available venues for designing solutions

5. Activating at the Organizational Level • What Activation Might Look Like: • A church taking a small segment of time during services to preach the connection between spiritual well-being and health. • Referral of the family of a child seen in clinic for a well-child visit to a paralegal services team (resident in the clinic) to get their landlord to fix building code violations • in their apartment. • The Role: • Understanding and communicating local role in impacting the health of the community • Pooling resources to solve a health need • Developing shared goals and methods for shared decision making and collaboration

6. Activating at the Community Level • What Activation Might Look Like: • Local community coalition creates an online inventory of assets in the community accessed by any organization or resident. • Community hosts a series of resident listening sessions each Wednesday night at local library to design solutions to address a health need. • The Role: • Engaging community in creating a shared purpose to address a particular health need • Understanding assets within the community and engaging stakeholders to address the shared purpose • Locating sustainable funding structures to keep the work going • Creating venues for residents to engage in decision-making

7. Mapping Your Assets

8. A Shift From Needs-Focused Assessment A need is defined as a gap or difference between a current situation and the ideal or desired situation. Most needs assessments are used to identify what the gaps are within a community, how to prioritize those gaps, and how to make decisions about which needs can be addressed through a particular intervention. Sounds great, right?

9. A Shift From Needs-Focused Assessment Needs-focused assessments risk defining an organization, neighborhood, or community by its problems - that generally require outside expertise and resources to "fix." (Roehlkepartain, 2005) Needs-focused assessments can have negative effects even when a positive change is intended because they force community leaders to highlight their communities' worst side in order to attract resources.

10. Asset Based Community Development(ABCD) • John McKnight and John Kretzman • Built on the notion that communities have never been built on their deficiencies, rather on the capacities and assets of the people and the place. • Does not imply ignoring problems and needs and throwing out rational, strategic planning; rather it is a rallying point for collective action.

11. “Can you tell us what people who live here have done together to make things better?” Building Communities From the Inside Out, 1993

12. Community Asset Mapping:A Shift From Needs-Focused Approach

13. Key Elements of An Assets/Strengths-Based Approach Focus on the capacities or gifts that are present in the community, not what is absent Stress local leadership, investment, and control in both the planning process and the outcome Surface both formal, institutional resources (such as programs, facilities, and financial capital) as well as individual, associational, and informal strengths and resources Seek to link the strengths and priorities of all partners, including the people

15. Beginning Your Asset Mapping Effort • Primary Building Blocks: • Assets and capacities located inside the community, largely under community control • Secondary Building Blocks: • Assets located within the community, but largely controlled by outsiders • Potential Building Blocks: • Resources originating outside the neighborhood, controlled by outsiders

16. Needs-Focused Map McKnight & Kretzmann, 1996

17. Assets-Focused Map McKnight & Kretzmann, 1996

19. Healthy Northeast Initiative Community Asset Map

20. Healthy Northeast Initiative Searchable Database

21. What happens when you draw upon your assets…

22. The Story of OneLA

23. The Story of Centering Pregancy

24. The Story of Centering Pregnancy

25. Chris Worth and Paraquad

26. Some Lessons • Get to know your population. Intimately. • Define your scale from the outset (“we’re going to go to 20,000”) and all the stakeholders and assets within the community that can reach that population. • Understand your purpose in relation to your population; you’re going to need it. • It’s in the telling of “war stories” that builds the will and confidence across sectors, not always in “best practice” • Get real about self interest.

27. Some Lessons • Honor your partners but don't seek consensus: • If a region waits for all stakeholders (esp. health systems) to cooperate they will never start. “Leave the door open.” • Health Care as a Second Language “HCSL” • “You have one mouth and two ears, use them proportionally” • Decisions are made by the those who show up. • Assume that you will need to lose a bit of control for much, much more power.

28. Who is doing work now? Who are the movers and shakers? Who gets things done? How has the community met challenges or accomplished goals in the past? What is the nature of social connectedness, cohesion and affiliation among neighbors (social capital) What are the prominent community values and interest groups? What are the perspectives on what a healthy and thriving child is? Where are the sources of community pride? Beginning Your Asset Map

29. Some Tools To Help Your Asset Mapping Effort • Asset Exploration Assessments to help you before you begin • Asset Based Community Development Institute

30. Some Tools To Help Your Asset Mapping Effort • The Community Tool Box: Asset Mapping Content, Capacity Inventory Tools, Questions to ask while asset mapping, etc.

31. Hire community residents to be active members of the convening organization’s team (parallel to peer aides) Host community meeting on a topic of importance – the intolerable condition? Share data with community residents Hold focus groups Engage in community organizing Co-convene health events: family activities, cooking classes, walking groups, health fairs Partner with schools, community centers, others to conduct ongoing programming And many other creative approaches… what’s yours? Other Ways to Include Community Stakeholders

32. “Nothing about this community without this community.”

33. Thanks for Joining Us! QUESTIONS?

34. INDIVIDUAL/CAPACITY:(e.g., Movers and Shakers, Talents, Resiliency) INSTITUTIONAL/GOVERNMENTAL: (e.g., Churches, Libraries, Schools, Transportation, Universities, Social Services) ORGANIZATIONAL: (Third Sector, Local Small and Large Businesses, Radio/TV/Media, Associations, Community Ctrs, Networks) SOURCES OF COMMUNITY PRIDE: (e.g., Sports Teams, Historical Events or Attractions, Cultural Events or Awards) OTHER CAPITAL:(e.g., Publically-Available Data, Financial Capital such as Grant Funding for Programs) Exercise: Start Your Asset Map

35. Exercise: Start Your Asset Map Start by thinking through your Primary Building Blocks in each of the areas. This is just the start of your map. You’ll refine and continue with your home team.