Neighborhood Organizations and ABCD

Many of us who worked as community organizers during the days of the Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP) were well versed in the concept of Asset Based Community Development, or ABCD. Asset Based Community Development is based on the simple idea that local assets are the basic building blocks of a sustainable community. This includes residents with skills, interest and local knowledge about their community.

The ABCD model stands in contrast to a mainstream funding model which views communities as a collection of problems and deficits and funders see themselves as the experts who will treat those problems.

ABCD starts by seeing the community as a collection of assets and resources, and asks "how can we build on these strengths?" rather than viewing communities through a lens of deficits.

The Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program, or NRP, empowered neighborhood organization to develop resident-driven neighborhood action plans. NRP was based on the idea that residents knew better than the City what was good for their community.

Neighborhood organization were funded by NRP to conduct thorough bottom up planning processes in more than 80 neighborhoods throughout Minneapolis. While the City initially thought that neighborhood organizations would take a few months to hold a few workshops to develop plans, most residents felt driven to develop much more inclusive planning processes that took as much as five years to get community agreement on a neighborhood action plan.

During the heady days of NRP, residents were seen as assets and partners to help the City realize sustainable goals, not problems to be overcome.

Between 1991 and 2017, NRP funded more than 171 neighborhood action plans (including First Step, Phase I and Phase II Plans). The NRP funded these plans over 25 years with more than $236 million. Neighborhood organizations, driven by innovative volunteers, generated an additional $30 million to implement their neighborhood action plans.

What was more important than the funding NRP provided was the key insight that residents themselves had the expertise, skills and capacity to lead and implement a community planning effort.

In contrast, it is worth examining the City's current recommendations for the future of neighborhood organizations, at http://www.minneapolismn.gov/ncr/2020.

Does the City's current recommendation see neighborhood organizations and their volunteers as assets, or as problems? This author thinks the documents speak for themselves.