These posts draw on my experience of community development to consider six categories of community assets. This first starts with local residents’ skills. You can find the categories listed towards the end of my post, What Are Community Assets?
Skills Audits
Local residents’ skills might be the most obvious source of community assets, after buildings and equipment. They are in some ways harder to identify, let alone quantify. Here are some reasons for this:
- some residents may not want to share their skills with others, at least not on other peoples’ terms
- the suspicion that sharing skills implies they must do things they don’t want to do
- skills audit forms are usually tedious and embarrassing to complete
- residents may not know what their skills are, for example if I’ve never chaired a meeting, how do I know whether I’m any good at it?
Skills audits are an unmitigated pain. A pain for those who complete the skills audit form and even more of a pain for those who must analyse and make sense of the answers.
Usually you select skills from a long list, based on the needs of some other group of people. You stare at a sea of tick boxes and find you can find hardly any that you can do. You imagine that everyone else is ticking scores of boxes and you are the only person totally lacking these skills. (The omnicompetent can happily tick all the boxes in certain knowledge they’ll never hear about the form again!)
Furthermore some organisation selects the tick boxes, presumably based on what they think they need, as if skills are somehow independent of the person who owns them. But someone may understand double entry bookkeeping but be unable to add columns of figures or use a spreadsheet; or they might be dishonest and not safe around cash.
Tasks Not Skills
There is a better way. Stop thinking about skills and start to think about the tasks. If you ask someone to do a job, you’re asking a human being with a history and their own specific take on the task at hand. What actually needs doing and who can do it? People who know the tasks that need to be done can offer to have a go. And of course, and perhaps even better, you can approach people who wouldn’t think of taking on a task and ask them to consider it. You need a reason for choosing them but it can be inspiring to chosen for who you are and not because you ticked the right box in a skills audit.
Of course, this person may not have all the necessary knowledge, skills and qualities to complete the task. How do you acquire these without opportunities? People can learn and if they take on a task they have an incentive to learn.
Another issue is when you discover they are not doing the task properly. I can remember taking on some jobs and being drowned in masses of information about how to do the job. I couldn’t possibly take it all on board. And most of the information was about the way my predecessor did the job and not particularly necessary. I needed to work out my approach to the task. (Predecessors have been very helpful but it does not follow every detail of their approach will work for me.)
You see, the issue is not really about individuals’ skills so much as the way an organisation gets the best out of people.
Sloughing
There is an insight from citizens’ organising, called sloughing. The word is normally used of snakes, when they grow by removing their outermost layers of skin. The idea is that any task in an organisation is an opportunity for someone who is less experienced to grow into. So, you seek someone challenged by the task.
Once they become adept at the task, it is time to move onto another. They move onto a new challenge and vacate the role for someone else.
This may not be possible for every organisation but it is worth some reflection. If you are interested in increasing community assets then don’t look at peoples’ achievements, look at their potential. Maybe not everyone will step up to a challenge but how many skills are never discovered because no-one ever tries to find them?