Welcome to my Online Home!

I'm in a pretty good Masters in Social Work "macro" class (the social work version of community organizing - activating folks for change, basically). The teacher's great, the conversations are pretty good...and the readings are consistently great.

Social Workers at UNC hear "use a strengths-based approach, not a needs or deficient based approach" enough to make it ring in our ears. That's a good thing. But we've gotten very few actually tools (well, to this point - maybe cuz I'm only half-way through?) to practice that. This week we got one of our first, and I'm a fan. If you do community work, this is a good "checklist" to help you brainstorm assets.

The folks at Northwestern are somewhat famous for their program and theory of ABCD: Asset-Based Community Development. Public Allies (alum '04 baby!) uses this model very explicitly in their community organizing work, so I became familiar with Northwestern then. I'm sure it's not new to them (though perhaps the term is), but it's good stuff nonetheless.

If you do community work - which I define loosely as anything from volunteering, organizing, even working in your neighborhood - I highly recommend a quick peruse of this. If you are explicitly involved in defining or deploying projects that impact communities positively (you hope! they hope!), definitely check it out as a FREE PUBLICATION from the ABCD institute at Northwestern:

http://www.sesp.northwestern.edu/images/kelloggabcd.pdf

Use the (ABCD) force, and use it wisely!

Labels: community