Many recent approaches to community development challenge the traditional focus on identifying a community's needs and argue instead for the benefits of mapping a community's assets. Mapping assets helps to connect people and resources within a community, stimulates the local economy, and provides a great foundation for community visioning or strategic planning processes. Furthermore, many communities have used an asset mapping process as a springboard to develop their own Quality of Life indicators, another innovative way for a community to know itself better and to track its progress by its own standards.

 

 

Asset Mapping

 

Organizations and resource centers

 

Asset-Based Community Development Institute (www.northwestern.edu/ipr/abcd.html)

John Kretzmann and John L McKnight pioneered the asset-based approach from over three decades of research into community development. The Institute consults with community builders and provides practical resources and tools to help community builders identify and mobilize their community's assets. Kretzmann and McKnight divide community assets into three main categories: individual capacities (e.g., individual skills and talents, leadership potential, and business skills and experience, especially including those typically marginalized in society such as youth, elderly, handicapped, etc); local institutions (e.g., schools, banks, libraries, parks, businesses, etc); and informal local associations (e.g., social and recreational clubs, neighborhood groups, road associations, etc).

 

 

Books

 

Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets. Kretzmann & McKnight. 1997. ACTA.

The textbook for the Asset-Based Community Development approach, written in accessible terms by the founders.

 

 

An Integral Approach to Community Asset Mapping

Several community development theorists have argued that we cannot get a full picture of the community unless we also become aware of "interior" or qualitative aspects of community, such as values and beliefs (e.g., how safe do people feel in the community? What is the quality of their relationships? What values are most important to community members?). Some have pointed out that, to get an even more complete picture, we also need to map the non-human natural assets of the community, such as the health of the redwoods, the numbers of frogs in the creeks, the quality of air and water, and so on. Many of these theorists apply Ken Wilber's "four quadrant" model and/or Don Beck and Christopher Cowan's Spiral Dynamics model to develop a more comprehensive map of community.

 

Organizations and resource centers

 

Integral City (www.integralcity.com)

This swanky new site was founded by integral theorist and facilitator Marilyn Hamilton to apply "Integral City Systems" for cultural creatives, city managers, and developers. She is an expert in integral community mapping for the global village of the future. We recommend her article Integral Community: Lenses, Values, Indicators (2003) available at www.integralcity.com.

 

Articles

 

Hochachka, Gail. (2005). Integrating Interiority in Community Development. World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution, 61(1-2): 110-126. (http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/link.asp?id=v50q2850881383m1) This article uses an action research project in a small community in El Salvador as a basis for exploring integral community development.

Tamas, Andy. (1999). Spirituality and Development: Concepts and Categories. (www.tamas.com/samples/samples.html). This article is an exploration of the complex intersection between spirituality and development, written by community and organizational consultant Andy Tamas.

 

Books

 

Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change. Don Beck & Christopher Cowan. 1996. Blackwell.

Beck and Cowan build on the biopsychosocial systems concept of Clare Graves to provide a map of "value memes" as a way of understanding human culture. Value memes are worldviews, belief structures, or valuing systems that organize thought and direct behavior. Beck and Cowan propose eight existing "v-memes" which are color-coded for easy understanding. For example, the Red meme is a stage marked by egocentric struggle for survival and power, a shameless pursuit of individual reputation and immediate gratification of senses and impulses. The Green meme, in contrast, is marked by a communitarian, egalitarian, consensual perspective. And so on. Understanding the different memes that may be at play in any given community or society has important implications for governance and community development processes. Rather than imposing one set of values on everyone in the community, good governance is where the health of the whole spiral is maximized by taking into account each sub-group's distinct developmental needs.

 

A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality. Ken Wilber. 2001. Shambhala.

This book is an accessible introduction to Wilber's integral vision, setting out his "4-Quadrant" model and demonstrating the theory's real-world relevance in a number of fields.

 

 

Quality of Life Indicators

 

Organizations and Resource Centers

 

Sustainable Seattle (www.sustainableseattle.org)

Sustainable Seattle was one of the first and largest citizen projects to find a more comprehensive way than economic statistics alone to measure community health. In 1991 they convened a large collaborative process though which the community developed its own quality of life indicators, including such factors as the ethnic diversity of school teachers, the number of pedestrian and bicycle-friendly streets, and how many wild salmon were swimming in the local waterways. Many cities across the US and throughout the world subsequently modeled their own community indicator process on the Seattle example. The website is a treasure trove of resources about sustainable community living.

 

Redefining Progress (www.rprogress.org)

Redefining Progress works with a wide array of partners to shift the economy and public policy toward sustainability. Their program "Sustainability Indicators" provides tools to more realistically assess the holistic health of communities.

 

 

Books

 

Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators. Hazel Henderson, et al. 2000. Calvert Group.

This compilation from many distinguished authors is the first comprehensive assessment of the quality of life in the USA using a systems approach.