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   Part B. Community Assessment, Agenda Setting, and Choice ... >
      Chapter 3. Assessing Community Needs and Resources >
         Section 8. Identifying Community Assets and Resources >
             Main Section - Introduction, what, why, when, who, and how. >

Identifying Community Assets and Resources

  

Main Section

 Contributed by Bill Berkowitz and Eric Wadud

What is a community asset?

Why should you identify community assets?

When should you identify community assets?

How do you identify community assets?

Mapping community assets

Using the community assets you have identified



Many community organizations focus on the needs or deficits of the community. And they should. Every community has needs and deficits; they ought to be corrected.

It is also possible to focus on assets and strengths -- emphasizing what the community does have, not what it doesn't. Why? Because those assets and strengths can be used to meet those same community needs; they can improve community life.

To accomplish this, we first have to find out what those assets are. So in this section, we will learn how to identify community assets and resources. We'll also show how they can be harnessed to meet community needs and to strengthen the community as a whole.

But first:


What is a community asset?

Our definition is broad. A community asset (or community resource, a very similar term) is anything that can be used to improve the quality of community life. And this means:

  • It can be a person -- the master mechanic down the street who can fix any car ever made. The stay-at-home mom or dad who organizes a playgroup. The church member who starts a discussion group on spirituality. Or a star high school athlete, a coach, a cheerleader, or a fan in the stands. These are all community assets.
  • It can be a physical structure or place -- a school, hospital, church, library, recreation center, social club. It could be a town landmark or symbol. It might also be an unused building that could house a community hospice, or a second floor room ideal for community meetings. Or it might be a public place that already belongs to the community park, a wetland, or other open space.

  • It can be a business that provides jobs and supports the local economy.

  • You are a community asset, too, and so are your friends, and the people you know, and the people you don't know yet. When you walk down the street, there are assets all around you. This is a very encouraging and promising way of seeing the world.

  • And actually, in a true sense of the word, everyone living in the community is a community asset -- at least potentially so, and probably really so. This is good news, because it suggests that everyone in the community can be a force for community improvement if only we knew what their assets are, and could put them to use.

One student of communities, John McKnight, has noted:

"Every single person has capacities, abilities and gifts. Living a good life depends on whether those capacities can be used, abilities expressed and gifts given."

Do you agree?


Why should you identify community assets?

Because they can be used as a foundation for community improvement. And also because:

  • External resources (e.g., federal and state money) often just are not available, whether we like it or not. Therefore, the resources for change must come from within each community.
  • Identifying and mobilizing community assets enables community residents to gain control over their lives. People can become active shapers of their own destinies, instead of passive clients receiving services from a variety of agencies.
  • Improvement efforts are more effective, and longer-lasting, when community members dedicate their time and talents to changes they desire.

Are there other reasons you can think of?


When should we identify community assets?

Every day. But here are some situations when it's especially desirable to do so:

  • When you don't know what those assets are. This may be especially true when you are new to a community.
  • When the community includes talented and experienced citizens whose skills are valuable but underutilized.
  • When you can't provide traditional services, even if you wanted to, and are looking for other ways to build up the community.
  • When you want to encourage residents to take pride in and ownership for local concerns and improvements.
  • When you want to strengthen existing relationships and build new ones that will promote successful community development in the future.

So here are the key questions we face:

What kinds of assets are available in the community?

And:

How can I work together with the community to mobilize these assets to help the community achieve its goals?

Let's take up these questions one at a time.


How do you identify community assets?

Some questions before you begin

The techniques for identifying community assets aren't very hard. You don't need a lot of special training or expertise to do the job well.

Before you begin, though, you do need to answer some important questions. You can do this yourself, in the privacy of your own home. But we recommend strongly do so before you start. Here they are:


1. What is the size of the community, in your case? It could be an entire town (or even larger), or a smaller village. It could be a part of a town -- such as a neighborhood, or an even smaller community, such as a housing development or cluster of blocks.

Obviously, the bigger the size, the more work is involved; and probably different study methods, too.


2. What people are available to do the work? You? You, plus some friends? A small group of people? A larger organization? Of course, you can also reach out to others, get them excited about the project, and recruit them to work with you.

And what about help from the town itself? It might be possible to get town government backing for a project like this, for knowing the community's assets is surely in the town's interest.


3. How much time do you have for the task or how much time can you allow? Tonight? A week? A month? As much time as it takes?

The more time you have, the more assets you will be able to uncover. Hopefully, you've got more time than just tonight. But unlimited time is not required, nor even desired. This task is time-limited.


4. How much money, if any, is at your disposal? Or, how much can you get a hold of? We're talking about money for copying, mailing, incidental expenses, rather than for bigger ticket items such as staff time. If identifying community assets can be made part of your regular work, that's certainly a plus, and worth pushing for but this is frequently a volunteer type of community job.

The more people, time, and money available, of course the more you can do. But even if you have just yourself, no money, and little time, you can still do useful work in identifying assets that will be helpful to the community especially if nothing like this has ever been done before.


5. Lastly, a big question, perhaps the most important of all: What do you want to do with the results? Do you just want to keep these assets on file? Or share them with others? Or use them for action? If so, what action, and how?

This is a very basic question, too often neglected. Our opinion: If you can't answer this question clearly before you begin, then perhaps you're not ready to begin.

Helpful hint: These are common questions that are part of any social intervention or action attempt. If you can get in the habit of asking, and answering, then every time you start out, success will be more likely to find you.

What comes next?

There are different approaches to identifying community assets. Each can be valid and useful. Which approach is right for you? The answer will depend in large part on your answers to the starting questions above. So, once again, answer them before you start.

But below are two basic approaches you could use in your own community. They complement each other. One of them focuses on the assets of groups -- specifically, associations, organizations, and institutions. The other focuses on individual people.

Identifying the assets of groups

The central task here is to take an inventory of all the groups (associations, organizations, and institutions) that exist in your community. You want to make a list. But how do you figure out what goes on the list in the first place? Some suggestions follow:


1. Get out a pad and start writing. Begin with what you know. Write down anything that comes to mind. You can always correct your list later.

Idea: You can do this work by yourself; but it might be more useful and fun to work with others. Are there other people who could join you and make this a group project?

Another idea: This is a great project for students or interns.


2. Use other sources of information to add to your list. These can include:

  • The yellow pages are a free, comprehensive, and often excellent source.
  • Town directories, published for your community alone.
  • Lists of businesses, probably available from the chamber of commerce.
  • Lists of organizations, which may have already been published. Check your library or town hall.
  • Lists of organizations, which are not generally published. For example, your local newspaper may have its own unpublished list that it could make available to you.
  • The local newspaper itself. Perhaps the single best current source in print. Plus other print sources as well local newsletters, regional papers, whatever you can get your hands on.
  • Bulletin boards. Physical bulletin boards, for sure; and also community-calendar type listings that might be found on local cable television.
  • Your friends and colleagues. They may know about other lists available. And even if they don't, they may know of groups, organizations, and community assets that are not on anybody else's lists.


3. When you finish, you may have quite a long list. That is a good sign -- it means that there are a lot of assets in your community. To expand your list further, go to Step 4.


4. In Tool #1 at the end of this section, there are some categories that commonly appear on lists of community resources. Check this supplement, and check to see whether they are included on your list. If yes, good. If no, go back and consider including them, together with specific names.

Helpful hint: It's also possible to learn more about each community asset you have identified. You can inquire about available staffing, space, equipment, expertise, and willingness to help and get involved in a variety of ways. This will take more time; is it worth it for you? For some possible questions you can ask, see Tool #2 at the end of this section.


5. Refine and revise your list. (You can put it on a computer, if you haven't done so already.) You can also break your list down in several different ways: alphabetically, geographically, by type of function, by size, by public/private membership or governance, or however you want.

You now have an inventory of groups and group assets in your community -- the associations, organizations, and institutions that are a fundamental part of community life and that can be used for community improvement. Congratulations on a job well done!

But what do you do now?

  • It's possible to put these assets on a map. For more information on how to do this, see the heading on Mapping Community Assets, coming up.
  • It's now desirable to think about how your list (or map) of assets could be used. See the heading on Using Community Assets, toward the end of this section.

Identifying the assets of individuals

In identifying community assets, compiling a list of key groups is one major approach. Another approach is to compile the assets of individuals. This can be challenging, because:

  • There are many more people than groups. In a community of 50,000, you might find 500 distinct groups, a hypothetical but reasonable figure; but there would be 100 times that many people (500 x 100 = 50,000). To survey that many people will take a lot of time.

  • The second major difference is that we often don't know people's assets unless we ask them. Their abilities and talents are often unknown. When listing organizations, if you encounter Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, or the Sunshine Nursery School, you immediately know what that group is about. But John or Jane Q. Citizen could be anything under the stars. We probably won't know until we ask them. That takes more time again.

And if everyone is a community asset, as has been suggested before, that time adds up significantly.

For both these reasons, identifying individual assets often (but not always) takes place over a smaller community area -- a neighborhood, for example, or some other place where the task is more manageable.

But many of the above suggestions still apply. Here's how identifying individual community assets could be done in practice:

1. Answer the 5 "starting questions" previously given, just as for studying the assets of groups.

2. Decide on the geographic area you want to cover.

3. Decide on how many people you are going to ask within that area. Everyone? A certain fixed percentage? As many as you can find? Resolve this question in advance.

4. Draft some questions you want to ask, which will get you the information you need. Are you interested in skills, ("I can play the piano"), or interests ("I'd love to learn")?

If it is skills, what kind of skills? academic, artistic, athletic, interpersonal, manual, office, organizing, parenting, vocational...? Human beings have many talents, and you probably want to narrow down your search, at least a little.

If interests, what kind as well? These too come in many and varied types.

Keep in mind:

  • Why am I collecting this information?
  • What do I want to use it for?

5. Design a method by which these questions can be asked. For example:

* Will you mail out a survey?

* Will you (more simply) have a survey available to pick up?

* Will you go door to door?

* Will you call people on the phone?

* Will you have scheduled interviews?

* Will you meet people in groups?

Each method has its pros and cons. For some of them, see Chapter 7, Section 3: Methods of Contacting Potential Members.

6. Try out your questions on a sample group. Based on their answers and their suggestions, you will probably want to make revisions. That's a good idea, and a natural part of the process. Professional surveyors do the same thing, many times over.

7. You've now got a territory to cover, some good questions that meet your needs, and a method for getting the answers. Good work. Now, collect your data.

An added bonus: When you ask people about their talents and abilities, that can also help encourage people to share them with others. So your survey may not only be identifying assets, but also promoting their use.


Mapping community assets

Once you have collected asset information, it's often especially helpful to put it on a map. Maps are good visual aids: when you can see the data right in front of you, understanding and insight often increases. There are several ways to go about this:

One mapping method is to find a large street map of your community, with few other markings. (Your local Planning Department may help here.) Then just mark with a dot, or tag, or push-pin (maybe color-coded by type) the geographic location of the groups and organizations you have found. The patterns that emerge may surprise you. You may see, for example, that certain locations have different numbers or types of associations. Those areas where few associations exist may be good targets for community development later on.

This type of mapping can also be done by computer. Software programs are available to help you do this. These programs are more flexible and sophisticated than paper-and-pushpin mapping, for with them you can create "overlays," visually placing one category of map over another, and changing these visual patterns with the push of a button.

It's also possible to diagram your resources on a non-literal map, but one which can more clearly show the linkages among different categories of assets.


Using the community assets you have identified

But whether or not you map your assets, the next and most important step is to make sure the assets you have identified get used. What you have done up to now is an achievement, because not every community has come so far. And yes, there is value just in expanding your own personal awareness of what exists in your community; and by sharing your results, you can also expand the awareness of others.

But the real value and payoff of identifying assets is in actions that will improve your community. You want to put your assets to work for you. If you have personal assets, such as savings, you probably don't want to hide them under a mattress. The same applies to the assets in your community. How can we maximize their return?

We'll itemize just a few possibilities below. Think about which might fit best for you, and what your own next steps might be:

  • You can publish the assets identified and make them available to all community members. In doing so, you will stimulate public asset knowledge and use.
  • You can target a particular neighborhood or other area for development, on the basis of the asset patterns you have found.
  • You can use your knowledge of assets to tackle a new community project -- because now you may have more resources to work on that project than you originally thought.
  • You can find new ways to bring groups and organizations together, to learn about each other's assets -- and perhaps to work collaboratively on projects such as the one above.
  • You can publicize these assets, and attract new businesses and other opportunities to your community. In both this example, and the ones just above, you are using existing assets to create new ones. (This is what makes community work exciting!)
  • You can create a school curriculum to teach local students about these assets, thus enriching their knowledge of the community and building community pride.
  • You can consider creating a "community coordinator," (or some other title), someone who would deal with assets every day. The coordinator's new job would be to find the right assets in the community to respond to any request or community concern. Would this position pay for itself?
  • You (or the new coordinator) can keep records how assets are used in the community, and use those records to generate ideas for improving asset exchange.
  • You can set up structured programs for asset exchange, which can range from individual skill swaps to institutional cost-sharing.
  • You can establish a process by which community assets keep getting reviewed, perhaps on a regular basis. New assets are always coming on the scene; it's good to keep up to date on them. By so doing, the whole asset-identification process can become a regular part of community life.

These may be enough ideas for a while. The next steps are up to you. Let us know how they work out.



We encourage the reproduction of this material, but ask that you credit the Community Tool Box: http://ctb.ku.edu



Resources

McKnight, J. (1992). "Building community". AHEC Community Partners Annual Conference, Keynote address. Northwestern University: Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research.

McKnight, J. L. (1992). Mapping community capacity. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University: Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research.

Moore, M. (1994). Community capacity assessment: A guide for developing an inventory of community-level assets and resources. Santa Fe, NM: New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department.