These are among dozens of health-related programs springing up around the country that are utilizing the asset-based community development strategies of the ABCD Institute. They give credence to the growing recognition that treatment is an incomplete route to good health.
"More and more people are recognizing there are limits to institutional diagnosis and treatment of sickness," says ABCD Institute co-director John Kretzmann. "They are seeing the power of local communities to produce health by building social networks, economic well-being, and environmental wellness."
Kretzmann's co-director, John McKnight, has been involved with health promotion for 25 years, and was a founder of the Healthy Communities Movement. Since his early work with public health nurses, McKnight has observed a burgeoning interest among health professionals in producing health. Their thinking has evolved from prevention, which tends to be focused on unhealthy behaviors and risk factors (e.g., teen pregnancy and auto accidents), to creative community health promotion.
McKnight says health institutions (hospitals and agencies) comprise the biggest continuing demand for help in adopting asset-based approaches. They want to become closer to communities in an effort to produce health, and, not incidentally, their own institutional economic stability, he observes.
Currently, at least four major thrusts in health promotion are advancing under ABCD tutelage:
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), through its five-year- old CATCH program, is funding pediatricians to develop plans to promote community health for children. Carol Pandak of AAP and McKnight have jointly produced "New Community Tools for Improving Child Health: A Pediatrician's Guide to Local Associations." AAP is currently distributing 10,000 copies of this booklet to people in the medical professions. The guide shows how neighborhood associations can play a vital role in promoting child health in local communities.
Health Forum, recently folded into the American Hospital Association, is a national organization devoted to community health and getting health systems and professions to focus on health promotion. It convenes conferences on health innovations and sponsors an annual class of Health Forum Fellows, professionals from medical institutions in North America. In more than six years of keynoting at these conferences and training these fellows, McKnight and Kretzmann have introduced asset-based thinking widely. As one step in this process, fellows were trained to develop inventories of hospital assets that could be used to foster community health.
The Sierra Health Foundation began a project five years ago, guided by McKnight and coordinated by Diane Littlefield of the Center for Collaborative Planning, to improve child health in 19 counties of Northern California. Its purpose was to offer funding, training, and support to small, rural communities to design their own local initiatives promoting child health. McKnight trained groups within each community to use research in identifying community assets that could be involved in this effort. A wide variety of initiatives has resulted.
A portion of England's new lottery funds are designated for special projects aimed at developing and improving 100 of England's poorest communities. One major effort is to create Healthy Living Centers in each locality, using ABCD ideas for finding and mobilizing community assets. These centers would provide support, resources, and space for community organizations, economic development groups, and health and wellness facilities.
Kretzmann, who has been advising various British government groups on this project, plans to work this summer with several Liverpool communities who are engaged in asset-based community health production. This fall, he will address a national gathering of public health officials in Manchester, England.
At the invitation of the United Nations, ABCD co-director John Kretzmann was off to Cairo in early June to guide its non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in using ABCD "tools" to stimulate community development. His mission was to help them analyze local resources they can utilize in this process. Kretzmann's trip was arranged after John McKnight briefed the staff of the Division on Poverty and Sustainability of the UN Development Program about the economic development methods that have emerged from his research. "This marks a turnabout in the traditional UN approach to assessing and addressing needs and deficiencies," says McKnight, who believes the UN hopes to apply these techniques to cities in other developing countries around the world. "We are increasingly interested in facilitating international dialogue about the most effective community development approaches," adds Kretzmann. "The United States has a lot to learn from developing countries."