Everyone has gifts, talents and energy to contribute!
Realizing Individual Capacities
Rather than focusing on the deficiencies, let’s focus on capacities! We can address our needs when we know what we have to offer each other. (needs are understood to be the problems, shortcomings, maladies and dilemmas of people) Every individual has needs and every individual has gifts and capacities. When gifts are given and abilities expressed, people are valued and can feel powerful and well connected to their communities, and the community around the person will be more powerful because of the contribution they are making.
Creating a capacities inventory
- List skills. These are learned skills – important to remember that these are not just those learned on paying jobs. They can have been learned at home, in the community in their neighborhood, their building etc. This is where brainstorming is best.
- List Priority skills. The person with the skills is usually best able to assess their own abilities and feel confident about them, therefore more likely to be willing to contribute them, or sell them in a marketplace.
- List community skills. If the person has participated in any community work and would be willing to do any such work in the future this is where it goes. The work a person is willing to do is their ‘raw material’.
- List enterprising interests and experience. Here is where any business activity goes. If the person has considered starting a business or is involved in a business of any kind – be it selling in a market, babysitting, shoveling, sewing, lawn-care, repair work… many times it will be called an activity, not a business, but be sure to include ANY money making activity, such as singing at weddings, courier work, lending of goods… etc.
*There is a form for a detailed capacities inventory interview on page 19-25
There are some people who seem to have no gifts or capacities. They get called names like mentally retarded, ex-convict, frail, elderly, illiterate and gang member. These are names for the emptiness we see in others… they focus on another’s needs. The effect of these labels is that they keep many people from seeing their gifts. They appear to be useless, so they are pushed to the fringe of a community or sometimes sent completely outside to an institution or to be rehabilitated, incarcerated, or receive services.
In weak communities there are lots of these fringed people… we say these people need help. They are needy, they have nothing to contribute. One short example: She is a pregnant teenager. She needs counseling, therapy, residential services, welfare, and special education. But there’s another side to that coin. She may have a beautiful voice and be needed in the church choir – or know how to cook and be needed at the local community kitchen. It’s a very empowering thing to change someone’s status from “needy” to “needed”.
Asset-based community development
- Mapping completely the capacities and assets of individuals, citizen’s associations, and local institutions.
- Building relationships among local assets for mutually beneficial problem-solving with the community.
- Mobilizing the community’s assets fully for economic development and info sharing purposes.
- Convening as broadly representative a group as possible for the purposes of building a community
vision and plan
- Leveraging activities, resources and investments from outside the community to support asset-based, locally defined development. (only when the capacities of locals have been thoroughly inventoried)
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