Existing and Emerging Models of Fighting Poverty from the Ground Up

Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD): The Asset-Based Approach- A new paradigm for empowering residents. () The heart of ABCD is a capacities-focused approach that seeks to empower the community and-by extension-mobilize citizens to create positive and meaningful change from within. Rather than simply focusing on a community's needs, deficiencies and problems, it helps a community become stronger and more self-reliant by discovering, mapping and mobilizing all their local assets. Do you realize how many assets a community has? This forum allows Red Hook residents to enter into a shared, open conversation on how best to build Red Hook - as well as other American communities - by tapping into our untapped potential. Among the assets in a typical community include: The skills of its citizens, from business owners to the homeless, youth to disabled people, from thriving professionals to starving artists; The dedication of its citizens associations —ministries, churches, CAC meetings, culture groups, social clubs, neighborhood associations, giving circles; The resources of its formal institutions — businesses, schools, libraries, community colleges, hospitals, parks, social service agencies (many of which are private); Through an asset-based ‘all-in’ approach, we can work together to fill much of these budget gaps in needed social services, mainly by increasing the reach and scope of grass-roots community outreach, philanthropy and common-man volunteerism. This is not just about numbers and budgets, but about proving the idea to our city and the entire country that compassionate conservatism can work when applied from the ground up

Here is an example: A Labor Opportunity Network-Individual Level (informally termed 'Neighbor-to-Neighbor/N2N' level) Key Example: Painting A Neighbor’s Fence. Imagine a scenario in which a resident of the Red Hook neighborhoods wishes to have her fence painted. She lives in a middle-income bracket and would like to make a charitable contribution to the wider Red Hook community, however modest. Instead of contracting a corporate entity to paint her fence, she decides to have a friend do it for a lower price, and is thinking of who to call up. She is then informed by her local (church/CAC meeting/neighborhood association/newspaper/landlord/etc) that the Human Empowerment Project works to supply such ‘side jobs’ to poor people in need of financial stability. She is told that such people would be both trustworthy and in genuine need; that they come from established ‘solidarity networks (also called 'reciprocity networks') based on the building of trust and responsibility, and that these small networks work along similar lines of micro-finance/micro lending-that is, the participants know each other or are indirectly linked to each other based on credibility, demonstrated responsability and word of mouth. She then decides to have two people from a local solidarity network paint her fence, and for half the price of a corporate contractor; the HEP looks at an ‘asset inventory’ of people in one of these networks to see who has done paint work before. It then links them over to do the paint job. She saves money and makes a charitable ‘donation’ to her community by providing two (trustworthy, responsible, pre-vetted) lower-income or otherwise struggling people with a dignified source of some side cash, all of which was earned. Based on her feedback to the HEP, the two individuals would likely become more solidly ingrained into the trust network based on proven responsibility and desire to work.

The Purpose of the Red Hook Sharing Network-An Asset-Based Community Approach

The purpose: To enable Red Hook residents to share the best ideas, trade their financial and human capital, talents, skills and knowledge to solve problems, and build their community from the ground up. There are (1) things that need fixing, there are (2) poor people in the community with the talents, skills and abilities to fix them, and there are (3) ways to discover these people and empower them to fix their community, thus connecting them with pathways of work-and by extension, financial stability. Most importantly, paying or assisting struggling residents in need of help in return for their community services acts to add value, not only the the residents but to the wider community. If we can use a pool of neighborhood funds (from the local church and neighborhood association, for example) to pay ten struggling, in-need Americans to renovate an impoverished section of a neighborhood, employing their skills and labor for a third of the price of a corporate contractor or unionized government service, then value is created from within the community, and peoples lives are more stable.