Asset Mapping

Asset mapping is most closely associated with John Kretzmann and John McKnight, and it was first delineated in their 1993 volume Building Communities From the Inside Out. After conducting more than a decade of research into community-building efforts around the USA, they coined the term Asset-Based Community Development to describe a specific and unusual approach they observed. These efforts were unique along several dimensions, but their most distinctive feature was their focus on what Kretzmann and McKnight called community assets. Rather than a more traditional approach to community development which begins with a needs assessment to identify the most pressing problems, or an organizing effort focused on addressing a defined issue, they encountered communities that started at an entirely different place: by looking around to see what good things they had going for them and trying to come up with a plan to build on those. Probing what these communities were doing, they discovered that most of them had already experienced what happened when they focused solely on what was missing in their community, and had realized that approach had not produced the results they were looking for. In thinking about their assets as a first step, these communities were engaged in a form of action research, though they certainly would not have called it that. They just knew that they were trying to first understand, then do something positive with, the good things they found in their community. These efforts had in common the fact that they were launched at the grass roots, possibly with support from organizations or institutions but typically driven by ordinary people.

When Kretzmann and McKnight (1993) shared this approach in their book, it resonated with many communities, whose subsequent experiments and experiences in its deliberate application helped further define the approach, its uses and abuses and the lessons that other communities could apply in their own attempts at community improvement. These attempts often included scholars and activists, who helped refine the approach and incorporated it into the growing field of action research. Since the early 1990s, while asset mapping rapidly expanded as both a term and a process used in the community-building domain, it also generated questions such as ‘Who governs the use of this approach?’ and ‘Who provides training in this approach?’ From the perspective of the scholars who coined the term, asset mapping was always an early form of non-digital freeware. Anyone could use it; anyone could interpret it for their own setting and purposes; anyone could build upon it. And people did just that, sometimes in ways that advanced the method as a true bottom-up community-building approach and also sometimes in frustrating ways that rendered it merely a reinterpretation of top-down community development practices. Asset mapping as a method has survived some rough periods, for example, in the late 1990s, when it became popularized as a regular component of many grant-making programmes. By requiring asset mapping in isolation, these opportunities set up many communities for confusion and disappointment. Mapping assets was inadvertently presented as a sort of community panacea, and innumerable groups carefully mapped their assets and then wondered why nothing had changed. Others understood the necessary connection with the mobilization of the assets identified, and contributed to the advancement of the work.

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