Asset-Based Community Development
A community development approach that starts with local assets, relationships, capacities and associations rather than deficits alone.
ABCD Institute / DePaul University
This page is a plain-English practice summary. It attributes the source field and avoids presenting the framework as Positively Devious intellectual property.
What this framework helps with
- mapping strengths before designing programmes
- building from local associations, gifts and relationships
- counterbalancing deficit-based narratives about communities
Three questions it helps teams ask
- What capacities, associations and informal networks already exist?
- Who connects people across boundaries?
- What can residents lead with modest support?
How to use it in youth and community work
Use Asset-Based Community Development as a lens for better decisions, not as a script. Start with the local context, invite the people affected by the work into the interpretation, and turn the framework into practical questions, design choices and learning habits.
For Positively Devious, this framework matters because it helps explain one part of the wider conditions around positive deviance: the relationships, opportunities, skills, systems and power arrangements that make uncommon positive outcomes more likely to be noticed and learned from.
What to watch out for
- asset-based work should not be used to ignore underinvestment or inequality
- asset maps are only useful when people can act on them
- professional services still matter when they are genuinely needed