Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) has been getting a lot of publicity recently. Some of you may have attended either the 2 day workshop in Manchester or the 1 day event in Shefield facilitated by Jim Diers and Cormac Russell. Jim spoke at the YHEP Champions of Participation 3 day residential (you can see his and all the other presentations here) last year and inspired many of us with his upbeat tales and pictures of empowered communities in Seattle.

You can see various videos and comments about the Manchester event here.

ABCD has resonances in aspects of Big Society, the governments community organising programme and is attracting interest in many local areas and programmes. 

 A brilliant paper from IDEA written by Jane Foot and Trevor Hopkins called 'A glass half-full' explores an asset based approach to community health anjd well-being. They are currently about to publish a new paper entitles 'What makes us healthy.

Two other short documents well worth reading are 

• Communities in Control: developing assets: is a report of the first European ABCD conference held in Liverpool in 2009 published by CarnegieUK Trust and written by Cormac Russell
• Agents rather then Patients - a report of a consultation by St georges house in 2003 with key invited participants.

The ABCD Institute in Illinois

is a mine of information and the original base for many ABCD theories and practitioners including its founders John McKnight (author of one of the seminal books on ABCD 'Building Communities from the Inside Out' and John (Jody) Kretzman.

Isn't all community development asset based?. -  an article worth re-visiting and of particular interest to people involved in community development over many years was written by Kevin Harris in the Guardian earlier this year.

If you have stories or links to ABCD in the region please contact us to insert your links here.