Nancy Adams Le Roy Jul 16, 2006 18:33 pm

This is a new string following up the second point in Sara Prichett's note under "A CBSM approach to flytipping" regarding needing a community development models to merge with FSB in low-income areas. I've attended two workshops in the last six months that have totally changed the way I think about sustainable development, community organizing, environmental advocacy, etc., which I have been doing for over 35 years as a professional or volunteer. One was Doug's workshop on Fostering Sustainable Behavior; and the other was a workshop by John McKnight on Asset Based Community Development. He and John Kretzmann developed this methodology and the ABCD Institute affiliated with Northwestern University in Evanston, IL USA. They studied over 3,000 stories of effective community initiatives and summarized what made the projects effective and then defined what made communities vibrant and successful. They have a wealth of information on their web site, www.northwestern.edu/ipr/abcd.html and a wonderful workbook called "Building Communities from the Inside Out -- A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets." Past models of development focused on identifying the problems, deficiencies, and needs of communities and bringing in outside experts and resources to solve them. The ABCD model focuses on identifying the assets and capabilities of communities and using them to "develop communities from the inside out." It's a very powerful shift from citizens being passive victims of their own circumstances to citizens taking charge of their own destinies, defining what they want that to be, and then taking steps to create the future they envision.

I'm really interested in combining ABCD and FSB principles/tools to help my region become as self-reliant and sustainable as possible to deal with the changes coming when we're not going to be able to bring in things from all over the world to meet our needs because of increasing costs and shortages of petroleum. ABCD and FSB principles/tools will be incredibly important to the whole concept of relocalization of our economies to deal with the coming realities. I totally agree with Sara that we need to merge FSB with community development models and think ABCD is a good one to go with. I'd really encourage Doug and those of you who are more familiar with FSB to consider this. We don't want to just change people's behavior, we want to build/create sustainable societies. These things are so intertwined. Since I'm just learning about FSB, I apologize in advance if I've I'm wrong in my thinking that FSB and sustainable community development are very different things.