Asset Based Community Development, design justice, and signals from the universe

Sometimes you just need to listen to what the universe is telling you. Stay with me on a short side trip before I get to the main point of this post.

I recently was recommended a book by author Peter Block that opens by honoring the influence of John McKnight and the ideas behind Asset Based Community Development (ABCD), a way of seeing communities and change. I had an oh-wow coincidence moment: The ABCD team was at Northwestern University when I began working there in 2006. My office was in the same small office suite as Jody Kretzmann – who founded ABCD with McKnight – and Deborah Puntenny, an ABCD researcher.

I got to know both Jody and Deborah. I’d occasionally pick their brains about their work. It was fascinating. Different from my professional world, but connected. Jody was a smart, pragmatic, cheerful man (now deceased). Deborah was always open to a curious office suite-mate.

So I read Block’s book. It piqued my interest again in ABCD. Then I went to a recent meeting concerning environmental equity in Evanston with two leaders of Environmental Justice Evanston. I asked one of the leaders if they had ever heard of ABCD. “Yes!” she said. Turns out both leaders had engaged with the ABCD folks in its early days (before I met Kretzmann and Puntenny) as part of their own community work.

And so the universe is telling me to go explore ABCD. I know when to follow a lead.

What fascinates me as I dig into ABCD is how it resonates with other work I gravitated toward in my teaching at the Master’s Program in Learning and Organizational Change. Specifically Dr. Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice, which takes a critical view of common design practices and advocates a more radical shift to “design with, not for.”

The full title of Costanza-Chock’s book is Design Justice – Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. Their work explores how to center power and agency in the community of folks who are impacted by design efforts, typically led by experts, in much the same way that ABCD centers the power and agency in the physical community (blocks, neighborhoods) who are the objects of expert programs or solutions to address the neighborhood’s issues.

In fact – in revisiting Costanza-Chock’s work – I (not surprisingly) found a conceptual link between ABCD and design justice. Both build on earlier research that frames citizen power relations as existing on a kind of ladder. At the lower rungs of the ladder, citizens are passive recipients of programs and services with no real participatory power. The middle rungs are activities that disguise the still-existing power relationships (tokenism, or extracting information or ideas that benefit the designers more than the community). At the top rungs, citizens have real power, either delegated to them (participatory budgeting may be an example) or where they exercise full control.

ABCD’s interpretation of a citizen power ladder focuses on residents of a specific physical community, and has four rungs:

• Residents as recipients
• Residents as information sources
• Residents as advisors/advocates
• Residents in control

Constanza-Chock does not create a new ladder interpretation. Instead, they use the research behind citizen participation power ladders as a useful tool for looking at power in the design process. The process is typically extractive. Folks who are to benefit from some designed thing may be engaged early in the process to help designers understand needs or desires. But these needs/desires contributions lead to a product or service which is “owned” by whomever pays the design team. Benefits accrue to the owners and the “users” become consumers.

You can see this dynamic even in social service settings. Let’s say a group of expert folks from a not-for-profit or a city department embark on an effort to design a solution to affordable housing. They talk to folks affected by the problem, design a program or service to solve the problems they discovered, and then put it into practice. This can be a legitimately collaborative co-creation. But it still results in a service that treats folks as consumers.

Constanza-Chock pushes us to think further and consider ownership and control (the top rung of the power ladder). What is the resident power/ownership in maintaining, updating or changing the program or service? How much direct or delegated power do they have to control the lifecycle of the solution? Might the solution even be designed to remove the service-provider/consumer power dynamic altogether, and instead create a model for full control and an opportunity to build individual wealth? (Yes, that’s been done. Here is an example from Peter Block’s book: An affordable housing advocate set up a housing model where renters in an apartment building opt in to do building management work, resulting in savings in building management costs, which are passed back in the form of cash to the renters if they stay for 5 years, creating individual wealth and housing stability).

What I am beginning to see here, I think, is that ABCD and design justice are two pieces of a palette of approaches that share a common foundation: Shift the power to communities and facilitate their creative and collaborative capacity to address challenges. Each approach on the palette brings unique attributes. But you want a palette that offers variety and options.

ABCD, for example, addresses community as a physical place. Place matters; we all live our lives in a particular and unique space. ABCD also relies deeply on the idea of first understanding a community’s assets: associations (informal relationships and groups); institutions (local to the community, like churches or schools); physical assets (land, built environment); exchange (businesses or informal economies); culture (stories and history); and individuals (talents and interests). ABCD practitioners make a point of differentiating this asset based approach from approaches that begin with identifying needs or challenges. It is important to first identify assets because assets are the things you can use to build something. You cannot build something off of a need.

[I recall having a conversation with Jody Kretzmann, in those days at Northwestern, and said ABCD sounds like an appreciative inquiry approach to community development. “It is,” he said, noting appreciative inquiry as one of his influences.]

But at some point you do need to actually build something with whatever assets you may have. And that is where the design justice mindset and practices come into play (See Design must be communal. And we are all designers.) I’ll also add to this having the continuous discovery mindset and practices.

Costanza-Chock’s design justice work puts into practice the “nothing about us, without us” mantra that emerged from disability rights advocates, and I see it fitting hand-in-glove with the ABCD mindset.

I don’t yet know enough about the application of ABCD practices to real community challenges and how those practices led to some “designed” solution. But I do know a couple of things from years of professional experience creating and implementing solutions to organizational challenges, and teaching design practices to organizational leaders. It’s easy to think of solution ideas. It’s hard to build solutions that actually work. If you don’t pay explicit attention to your design process, you are hosed.

A few things make that true:

• We tend to jump to the first solution idea that comes to mind (often one used by someone else – e.g., a “best practice”) rather than think through many viable options that we may test.
• We tend to over-engineer our initial ideas. Way too much complexity.
• By necessity we need to make assumptions to develop a solution. But we rarely identify those assumptions and check to see if they are true.
• Everything changes. By necessity we design for a moment in time and space. But eventually time moves on and things change, often in ways we could never predict.

The methods and tools and practices of design (design justice + continuous discovery specifically) give us a way to work through these truisms to build solutions that actually work, while holding true to a desire to work at the top rungs of the power ladder. These methods help us ensure that the community participates throughout all phases of the design process, essentially taking on the role of co-designers. Outsiders with design process expertise are resources and facilitators. Outsiders need to let go of any power position they might otherwise enjoy as expert leaders who come to fix a problem.

What strikes me is this approach is so much like the way I and my co-instructors taught. We invited folks into a space (time and place) to learn to see what they do in their professional roles as design, then to explore design practices and to find a way to weave those new capabilities into their way of working. It was pedagogy based on letting go of our power position.

Shift the power to communities and facilitate their creative and collaborative capacity to address challenges.

In my previous post, The limitation of relying on a single style of community meetings, I end with this: Community listening deserves a richer palette of engagement styles. How do we begin to shift away from the predominant style, and toward a balanced mix of approaches that each provide different but overlapping value?

Maybe it’s first we need to build our palette (or assets?). ABCD and design justice. Critical pedagogy. Communities of practice and social learning. Positive deviance.

And then when the opportunities arise, advocate to employ the best bits from our power-shifting palette.

---

The photographs which accompany these posts are taken by me, and show different settings and views of Evanston (where I live). It is a visual reminder that this is the most important setting for belonging and contributing to community: our neighborhoods, our cities.