Learning our ABCD’s: Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD)
This winter we’re learning about internships and mentorship, and building capacity for arts and art programs. Lately, we’ve been learning about something called Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD). Yeah, the name sounds super formal, but the idea? It actually makes a lot of sense—and it’s kind of what a lot of us have already been doing without realizing it.
Basically, it’s this: instead of focusing on what a community doesn’t have, ABCD is all about paying attention to what isalready there. The people. The skills. The stories. The culture. The care. The stuff that doesn’t always get noticed or funded or written about, but is still keeping things going. Especially in the arts.
For small projects and grassroots collectives like ours, this way of thinking hits home. Most of the time, we’re not working with big budgets or fancy gear or even a proper space. But we are working with each other. With ideas. With our culture, our languages, our grandparents’ teachings, our playlists, our phone cameras, our kitchen tables.
ABCD helped us understand that we don’t always need to wait for someone to “give” us opportunities—we already have a lot of what we need to build something meaningful. We just don’t always see it because we’re so used to being told what we lack.
This winter, we’ve been talking a lot about how art isn’t just what goes in a gallery or on a stage. It’s what happens when we organize as a community, like writing a song about our hometown, filming our friends skating, painting a mural, making a zine, remixing something old into something new. That’s creative leadership too. That’s care work. That’s culture work.
ABCD reminds us that leadership doesn’t always look like a title. It looks like checking in on each other. Showing up. Sharing stories. Making space. And that’s something we see happening all around us already.
So yeah—we’re not starting from nothing. We’re starting from here. And here? It’s actually full of possibility.