Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets

This is a guide about rebuilding troubled communities. It is meant to be simple, basic and usable. Whatever wisdom it contains flows directly out of the experience of courageous and creative neighborhood leaders from across the country. Most of this guide is devoted to spreading community-building success stories. These stories are organized into a step-by-step introduction to a coherent strategy that we have learned about from neighborhood leaders. We call this strategy “asset-based community development.” Before beginning to outline the basic elements of this approach, it will be helpful to remember how so many of our communities came to be so devastated, and why traditional strategies for improvement have so often failed.