I’m not familiar with Asset Based Community Development (ABCD). However, Cormac Russell’s book “Looking Back to Look Forward” has inspired me to find out more.
The book is primarily Cormac Russell “in conversation with John McKnight about the heritage of Asset Based Community Development and its place in the world today”. John McKnight is one of the founders of ABCD. The core of the book explores nine key thinkers, who were or are McKnight’s contemporaries and inspirations.
The book has a helpful bibliography about ABCD. ABCD will re-issue it in an expanded form in 2016, to include interviews with other founders of the movement.
Alinski and Illich
Of the nine key thinkers I was previously familiar with two, Saul Alinski and Ivan Illich. The other seven thinkers and activists cover a vast area of expertise in areas such as a health, education and the arts.
Ivan Illich observed that as institutions develop they move from their foundation principles through various phases. They culminate in self-defeat, meaning they reinforce the problems they were set up to solve.
They clearly illustrate this principle in the economy. Local businesses exist to enrich communities. Good business people leave a trail of new or improved businesses because their model is generosity. Obviously things don’t always pan out that way and many business owners do not excel as employers, for example. We remember the pioneers of the industrial revolution who left a great civic legacy. They were also exploiters of their employees.
At some point in the growth of a business it slips its moorings and ceases to benefit the wider community, concentrating wealth in fewer hands and extracting it from circulation in the economy. So, big businesses no longer enrich and begin to impoverish local economies.
Communities from the Inside Out
The vision behind ABCD is residents can grow their communities from the inside out, using the assets naturally available to them. They throw “their lives into becoming the counterbalance to a non-sustaining consumer culture”. Their negative view of the marketplace perhaps marrs his positive approach in some part. I would like to see a more positive vision of the marketplace when it is a place for sharing of local assets.
There has to be some focal point where communities share their assets and why not call it the marketplace? It would certainly be a more historically accurate use of the word than the current neo-liberal version.
The assets available to communities appear to fall into six categories:
- local residents’ skills;
- local associations and the power they exercise;
- resources of public, private and non-profit institutions;
- physical resources and ecology;
- economic resources of local places; and
- the stories and heritage of local places.
It would be interesting to explore each of these in some depth and to find out how the longer book due out in 2016 develops them.
Whilst I am sure the ABCD approach is on the right lines, I am less sure it has sufficient leverage to effect the changes we so desperately need. I hope to see in the longer book a positive approach to reclaiming marketplaces in local neighbourhoods and an analysis of the political leverage required to effect real change.
