Peter Block believes in Asset Based Community Development

http://www.designedlearning.com/insights/CityBeat_Sept2003.asp

My highlights below:
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It's the citizens who make neighborhoods safe, control the traffic, educate children and decide how healthy they will become.

"Who's responsible for your health?" he says. "Your doctor? Or you?"

Block tells a story about Naperville, Ill., where residents of a neighborhood complained to the transportation department about unsafe traffic. They wanted stop signs, speed bumps and better enforcement. Then a study found that 70 percent of those speeding through the neighborhood lived there.

The police department challenged neighbors to call a meeting of residents. They settled on a "pace car program" in which everyone agreed to drive the speed limit.

http://www.naperville.il.us/emplibrary/03bridgesjulaug.pdf

"Citizens were both the cause and the solution to what they were worried about," Block says.

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"Most of us are busy answering the wrong questions," he says.

Try these questions instead, he suggests: What did we do to help create this situation? What do we want to create together here? What's the conversation you've never had before? What's the commitment?

He especially likes this question: What is worth doing?

"As soon as you ask that, you go against the culture," Block says. "Most of us medicate ourselves with speed and efficiency, and technology is the drug of choice."

Cell phones illustrate his point.

"I still have nothing to say, but now I can call you anytime," he says.

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"Implied in all of this is the idea that engagement is the design tool of choice; it is how social and cultural change happens," he wrote in The Answer to How Is Yes. "For complex challenges, especially when we create a system that goes against the default culture, dialogue itself is part of the solution. We need to believe that conversation is an action step."

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This year Block also helped City Manager Ray Patchett of Carlsbad, Calif., develop a conference called "Connecting Community Place and Spirit" to discuss the design of a planned civic center.

First, as always, they shaped the question: "What is a civic center? Is it a place where bureaucrats hang out or where citizens convene?" Patchett says.

Carlsbad's citizens decided a civic center should be a space for connecting and for reinforcing ideas, so they designed a structure to make conversations happen. Offices occupy only part of the building; there are also indoor and outdoor meeting spaces, an "outdoor living room" and amphitheater, Patchett says. They plan to create a web of public facilities by building trails between the civic center, other neighborhoods and the community's eight parks.

The conference and the "engagement teams" formed in response also set in place a community architecture that allows citizens to convene quickly around any issues that arise.

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Block insists that we must focus on people's gifts rather than their deficiencies, because paternalistic efforts to help people, well, don't.

"When is help helpful and when is it disabling?" he says.

John McKnight, Director of Community Studies at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, uses a medical term -- "iatrogenesis," or doctor-created disease -- to describe the phenomenon.

Twenty years ago, all professional ideas about how to help poor people or older inner-city neighborhoods were couched in the assumption that they were "needy," according to McKnight.

"If you cared about these people, the way you started was defining their needs," he says.

Professionals identified the alcoholics, the drug addicts, the school dropouts, the buildings below housing codes. They decided what was wrong and then what they could do to fix the "needy" people and their places.

McKnight's research found that approach had an "iatrogenic effect" because it assumed that what was most important about people was their brokenness and, what's more, they couldn't do anything about it.

People started to believe they were the problem but not the solution. Local organizations, associations and churches were ignored because "they had nothing to do with the building of the community" undertaken by outside groups, government officials and other professionals. A culture of dependency developed.

McKnight's work, called "asset-based community development," focuses instead on the "skills, capacities and capabilities" of individuals. It identifies the unpaid associations, organizations and churches doing good things in the neighborhood and the local institutes whose resources and capacities could be reoriented to enhance the local community. He describes it as "identifying the full half of the glass."

Block saw the parallels between McKnight's work in neighborhoods and his own with large organizations. Instead of a top-down approach, they identify the greatest asset as the intelligence, creativity and values of workers and individuals.

http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/abcd.html

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