CR #6: The Importance of ABCD
The Asset-Based Community Development model is unlike the need-based model in that this model recognizes the community’s assets and uses those strengths to improve the community. ABCD encourages fostering leadership, recognizes the community’s strengths and capacities, empowers local associations, and mobilizes community members around a common vision or plan. Some of key concepts of the ABCD model are social capital, habitus, assets, field theory, and appreciative inquiry. ABCD is different from Community Economic Development in that ABCD still thinks of money as significant in order to make a community thrive. The CED model go hand-in-hand because they both analyze the hardware and infrastructure they have have to solve the most important issues in the community. With ABCD, land, labor, and capital are involved in creating economic development. For example, opportunity zones are neighborhoods where they have incentives for people to buy the land. This allows the community to gain more land and also increase the community’s capital.
The Ritter Center uses both social and economic capital as means to utilize their assets in their community. Social capital is the “store of goodwill and obligations generated by social relations” (Mathie & Cunningham, pg. 479). This means that social capital is created through the social networks, relationships, and social trusts within a community. There are two forms of social capital which are bonding and bridging social capital. Bonding social capital is apparent among close knit relationships with friends and families who are dependent on basic survival (Mathie & Cunningham, pg. 479). On the other hand, bridging social capital allows people to ‘get ahead’ in order to gain greater opportunities within the community they are in (Mathie & Cunningham, pg. 480). The social capital that is present at the Ritter Center are the donors, volunteers, staff such as the case managers, program managers, directors, nurses, and upper management. The assets that are associated with economic capital are the donations, government funding, and property.
The assets that are present in the community can greatly help with reaching out to the homeless individuals in the community. I believe that the Ritter Center can really utilize their volunteers to form an outreach committee to do a couple of hours a day to reach out to the homeless individuals that are familiar with the Ritter Center. Additionally, the Whole Person Care housing case managers at the Ritter Center are one of the staff that have built a close relationship with the clients. The case managers can easily speak to their clients about the 2020 Census and why it is important to their community. Many of the homeless individuals do not know what the Census and how is can help their community. Education is the best way to gain more participation in the Census.
