The Latest

Waiting at the Intersection of ABCD and Collective Impact

I recently received an email question from a colleague curious about the different approaches identified in the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) and collective impact frameworks.  They commented that ABCD seemed to be more grassroots driven while collective impact seemed to be more top down driven.  This question led me to consider our approach at Tamarack to understanding and incorporating different organizing frameworks into our thinking and training. I thought I would share my response with everyone. 

Read More

What Makes Your Neighbourhood Work an Asset-Based Community Development Process?

Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) is not a new concept. About 40 years ago, John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann, took a four-year learning journey, visiting twenty cities and talking to 2,000 people in neighbourhoods which culminated in the book Building Communities From the Inside Out: A Path Towards Finding and Mobilizing a Neighborhood’s Assets. They wanted to discover if people knew who lived on their block and if they do things together. From this journey, 125,000 books have been sold and a movement was created.

Read More

Seeking Teachers: Stories and Questions in Asset-Based Community Development

I wish to acknowledge Paul Born and the entire Vibrant Communities team at the Tamarack Institute, with special thanks to Heather Keam for the invitation to reflect on the masterclass workshop at Asset-Based Community Development for Healthy Neighbourhoods.

In April 2018, I attended Asset-Based Community Development for Healthy Neighbourhoods held in Kitchener, Ontario, as a guest of the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement. My interest in attending was to reconnect with Paul Born, Co-CEO of the Tamarack Institute, after hosting him for an event at Western University in 2014, and to take the opportunity to learn from John McKnight, one of the founders of Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD).

Read More

Talking Friendly Streets: A Community Engagement Project

Read More

The ABCD Workshop – What we Learned and What's to Come

From April 17-19 Cities Deepening Community held an Asset-Based Community Development workshop in Kitchener, Ontario with John McKnight, Cormac Russell, Donna Thomson and almost 200 community changemakers. You can imagine there was a lot of learning to absorb! We have done our best to sum up our primary aha's! into a few takeaways.

Read More

(Dis)ability and “Enough Already”

Since attending the recent asset-based community development (ABCD) event in Kitchener, I have begun to think that I may have gotten something about community development fundamentally wrong by thinking of the term 'community' almost exclusively as a noun.

Read More