Asset Building Community Development

A comprehensive approach focused on sustainable change Asset Building and Community Development, Fourth Edition examines the promise and limits of community development by showing students and practitioners how asset-based developments can improve the sustainability and quality of life. Authors Gary Paul Green and Anna Haines provide an engaging, thought-provoking, and comprehensive approach to asset building by focusing on the role of different forms of community capital in the development process. Updated throughout, this edition explores how communities are building on their key assets—physical, human, social, financial, environmental, political, and cultural capital— to generate positive change. With a focus on community outcomes, the authors illustrate how development controlled by community-based organizations provides a better match between assets and the needs of the community.

This timely Research Handbook offers new ways in which to navigate the diverse terrain of community development research. Chapters unpack the foundations and history of community development research and also look to its future, exploring innovative frameworks for conceptualizing community development. Comprehensive and unequivocally progressive, this is key reading for social and public policy researchers in need of an understanding of the current trends in community development research, as well as practitioners and policymakers working on urban, rural and regional development.

Social change affects all quarters of life and human society whether in individual neighbourhoods, communities or nations, or in the world as a whole – encompassing many issues of gender, age, social class and ethnicity. This book examines both the conceptual as well as operational aspects of social transformation and social development. It examines societal transformation at the individual, group, community, national and international levels using a range of case studies from Singapore, Asia and around the world. The four parts of this book highlight the challenges of social development; issues concerning workforce and migration; welfare, women and social care; as well as, community development and capacity building. Social development and social transformation are presented as intertwined concepts that affect citizens in profound ways from social care to social well-being, construction of social relationship as well as community life, capacity building and nation building.

Beginning with the foundations of community development, An Introduction to Community Development offers a comprehensive and practical approach to planning for communities. Road-tested in the authors’ own teaching, and through the training they provide for practicing planners, it enables students to begin making connections between academic study and practical know-how from both private and public sector contexts. An Introduction to Community Development shows how planners can utilize local economic interests and integrate finance and marketing considerations into their strategy. Most importantly, the book is strongly focused on outcomes, encouraging students to ask: what is best practice when it comes to planning for communities, and how do we accurately measure the results of planning practice? This newly revised and updated edition includes: increased coverage of sustainability issues, discussion of localism and its relation to community development, quality of life, community well-being and public health considerations, and content on local food systems. Each chapter provides a range of reading materials for the student, supplemented with text boxes, a chapter outline, keywords, and reference lists, and new skills based exercises at the end of each chapter to help students turn their learning into action, making this the most user-friendly text for community development now available.

" We need our neighbors and community to stay healthy, produce jobs, raise our children, and care for those on the margin. Institutions and professional services have reached their limit of their ability to help us. The consumer society tells us that we are insufficient and that we must purchase what we need from specialists and systems outside the community. We have become consumers and clients, not citizens and neighbors. John McKnight and Peter Block show that we have the capacity to find real and sustainable satisfaction right in our neighborhood and community. This book reports on voluntary, self-organizing structures that focus on gifts and value hospitality, the welcoming of strangers. It shows how to reweave our social fabric, especially in our neighborhoods. In this way we collectively have enough to create a future that works for all. "

Developmental Assets and Asset-Building Communities examines the relationships of developmental assets to other approaches and bodies of work. It raises challenges about the asset-building approach and offers recommendations for how this approach can be strengthened and broadened in impact and research. In doing so, this book extends the scholarly base for the understanding of the character and scope of the systemic relation between young people's healthy development and the nature of developmentally attentive communities. The chapters in this volume present evidence that asset-building communities both promote and are promoted by positive youth development, a bi-directional, systemic linkage that - consistent with developmental systems theory - further civil society by building relationship and intergenerational places within a community that are united in attending to the developmental needs of children and adolescents.

Finally, a book that offers a practical yet well-researched guide for practitioners seeking to hone the way they show up in citizen space. At a time when public trust in institutions is at its lowest, expectations of those institutions to make people well, knowledgeable, and secure are rapidly increasing. These expectations are unrealistic, causing disenchantment and disengagement among citizens and increasing levels of burnout among many professionals. Rekindling Democracy is not just a practical guide; it goes further in setting out a manifesto for a more equitable social contract to address these issues. Rekindling Democracy argues convincingly that industrialized countries are suffering through a democratic inversion, where the doctor is assumed to be the primary producer of health, the teacher of education, the police officer of safety, and the politician of democracy. Through just the right blend of storytelling, research, and original ideas, Russell argues instead that in a functioning democracy the role of the professionals ought to be defined as that which happens after the important work of citizens is done. The primary role of the twenty-first-century practitioner therefore is not a deliverer of top-down services, but a precipitator of more active citizenship and community building.

This book describes communities that first built on their own assets, before seeking assistance from outside. What are the common factors that help all these communities mobilize? Do outside organizations have a role to play? It is aimed at community workers, researchers and policy makers who want to take a fresh look at community development.