What's Revolutionary About Valuing Assets as a Strategy in Cultural Work?

I believe asset-based cultural work is inherently radical. While it represents fundamental change in various community-building practices, it is truly revolutionary for those working in arts and culture.

What is asset-based cultural work? What exactly are community or cultural assets? Where do we find them and how do we put them to work? If they’re not cash, real estate or equipment – what do they have to do with the arts anyway?

In all manner of community-based work there has been much chatter the past few years about identifying and mobilizing assets -- human, organizational and community strengths, resources and capacities. A growing number of practitioners and funders in community development and social-change work are adopting this strategy, and its terms have increasingly become part of the lexicon. But do we, as people working in the arts and culture, know how they’re relevant to us and what larger principles and philosophies are behind them?

In this article I’ll examine the principles and ideas behind asset-based work and “translate” them, or put them in the context of the arts as both management and cultural practices. Further, I’ll contrast asset-based work with traditional Western cultural paradigms and say why I think asset-based approaches represent radical change. This way of thinking and working, I believe, is far more than just another way of doing business.

Asset-based organizing may have originated as a way to generate action and build programs with little or no money. Ultimately it evolved into well-developed practices leading to community empowerment and a means to advance social, cultural and economic equity. Asset-based cultural development – like its cousin asset-based community development – is another way to get things done in resource-poor communities, but it goes much deeper. Community-based arts practitioners, who responded creatively to the impulse to recognize and raise up important and otherwise unheard stories, are mobilizing assets and advancing social-justice and social-change efforts in more ways than one.

Activists employing asset-based community-organizing strategies and those using similar strategies in cultural work have a lot to learn from each other. They are not simply making do with what they’ve got. They're using creativity to see what you’ve got and using it to leverage more – building on strengths to overcome weakness. Fundamentally, it’s about fostering the capacity to see, cultivate, and use power you and your community didn’t know you had. It’s about seeing the world and approaching the work from a position of strength rather than weakness, and about taking initiative rather than (or in addition to) an oppositional stance. When marginalized people show they can exercise power, it’s far more threatening to the status quo.

Partners in Asset-Based Thinking and Action

In 1993, John L. McKnight and John P. (Jody) Kretzmann published a book called "Building Communities From the Inside Out: Towards Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets."[1] Emerging from their research and community organizing work, it articulated asset-based organizing and development strategies and provided practical approaches and tools. The authors set up a language and framework to describe and facilitate this way of thinking that starts from an analysis of assets, strengths and capacities – to see change and power as things that most appropriately come from within. This is in contrast to the old approach of working from deficits, problems and limitations – perpetuating the sense that communities were powerless and had to depend on outside intervention, resources and problem-solvers.

Community organizers and the progressive wings of the community development and philanthropic fields got excited about this work. For some it represented a paradigm shift. For others it reinforced their instincts and gave language and a formal structure to their work. Some community development funders, in particular the venerable Ford Foundation, adopted this thinking. Ford went so far as to rename one its three primary program areas, Asset-Building and Community Development. As such, their focus includes building communities’ human and economic assets and capacities. Rather than naming and organizing programs around problems like hunger, poverty and disease, they believed that building on strengths is the best way to address difficulties. A decade later Kretzmann and McKnight's book remains the primary text for this practice.

Around the same time that these two authors were developing their ideas for the community development sector, practitioners and researchers in youth development were taking a similar approach. Led by Minneapolis-based Search Institute, asset-based youth development strategies were developed to focus on uncovering and building the innate strengths and interests of the individual young person, a shift from fixation on their shortcomings and categorizing them by their deficiencies.

Major corporate enterprises, along with academic researchers and business schools have been on a similar track for some time as well. Strategic business planning has come to rely on smart analysis of the assets of an enterprise and its market potential as the way to increase market share and revenues and to beat out competition – finding and investing in unique qualities that are attractive to consumers. Focusing limited resources on trying to acquire what one doesn’t have, or do what one doesn’t do, is no formula for success. The more strategic avenue is to build on or complement existing strengths and core business activities. The “art,” if you will, is to understand exactly what those are.

Meanwhile, most of the cultural sector in the U.S., and perhaps the West in general, still functions on a deficit-based model – and I’m not talking about their operating budgets. Not only have nonprofit cultural organizations been slow to take on asset-based management strategies, but also, more fundamentally, they see themselves existing in a world where most people lack culture, lack talent and lack exposure to and proper appreciation of the great works and the great artists. Spending their resources trying to fill such a void is futile. It’s essentially an act of cultural imperialism, or trying to impose self-designated superior forms of culture on others for self-aggrandizement. While this is certainly most true among classical Western art institutions that are modeled after the Catholic Church, it’s an approach that infiltrates all levels of well-meaning arts missionaries who bring enlightenment to the unwashed.

Urban planners and city leaders have likewise spent enormous resources and efforts identifying things their cities lack as they try to copy what has seemed to work for others. Thus, the fixation on sports arenas, convention centers, Wal-Marts and aquariums – even major performing arts centers or museums. These big-box “solutions” rarely “fix” anything, nor do they bring widespread prosperity or better public services to their citizens. Instead they result in continued concentration of wealth, displacement, disintegration of urban fabric and a servitude in which locals become low-wage labor in service to corporate investors.

Big-box arts presenters, increasingly part of urban fix-it strategies, import lowest-common-denominator material that sends the message that culture comes from somewhere else and requires big names and major sponsors to be realized. Focusing on and nurturing the unique and special strengths and assets of a city or neighborhood ultimately leverages and attracts more resources and creates a more sustainable and equitable environment. Exchanges with the larger world help in that process but not when they diminish the cultural practices of the local.

Assets Are Value-laden

One thing I like about asset-based thinking is that it appropriates language from divergent sectors including those who trade in financial capital. Of course, the meanings are very different. To say that assets are value-laden is to say that one sees a set of attributes in a person, organization, community or place through a lens that is trained to filter through a particular set of political and social values. Someone with a different set of values will see something completely different. This is something we learn through the visual arts, in addition to the concept that we can train ourselves, to some extent, to use different lenses. Artists draw out attributes based on what they see through their filters. Organizations can do the same but tend to be less clear on their values. Community coalitions face even greater challenges in finding unity and clarity.

For organizations or communities that employ asset-based strategies, it is imperative to first focus on articulating values. I’ve learned this from using an asset-based process in strategic planning. If groups identify their own or their community’s assets without first becoming clear on their values, they’ll not only wander aimlessly, but the assets they see may not really be the ones they need to advance their mission. Asset-based planning or development in the absence of social-justice values can be like New Republicanism – it’s about the rich getting richer and the strong getting stronger. In other words, it's a kind of social Darwinism that fails to recognize that cooperation and compassion, or mutual aid, are fundamental traits that have propelled the species. They apparently see greed and selfishness as the highest of motivators.

Developing capacity to see assets is not about looking at the world through rose-colored glasses, about putting positive spin on bad situations or about ignoring problems or deficiencies. Asset-based strategies are centered in mobilizing strengths to leverage change and to overcome deficiencies. Simply in terms of rallying people’s energies to a cause, it’s more effective to lead with vision and possibility rather than stories of defeat. This is one way artists’ unique capacities have contributed to social movements.

A community arts center director may look into her impoverished urban community and see immigrant populations committed to hanging on to traditional cultural practices. In this, she sees fertile ground for building bridges of communication. She finds artists among these communities who can serve as ambassadors and teachers, and she sees foods, celebrations and aesthetic practices as vehicles to learn about and build more substantial dialogues across cultures. This leads to strategies to ease tensions, facilitate neighborhood and civic life, and assist children in gaining access to better education. These cultural strengths also provide ground upon which grassroots economic development can take place.

A real-estate developer looking at the same community also sees a collection of assets that can be leveraged to create change: low-cost land and malleable people with no political power who are accustomed to being dislocated. He sees existing road, water and sewer infrastructure, tax subsidies and the prospect of public funds to remediate blight. He also has a vision: a new gated community with an artificial lake and a hefty profit. These two ways of seeing represent somewhat different values, visions and assets.

A regional museum can certainly use asset-based approaches to develop its collections or raise money. Like any enterprise, it will look to its strengths. Where is its collection and curatorial staff already strong? An inventory of their patrons’ holdings and of the community might reveal strengths that can help them build on what they’ve got. How can the institution’s assets be mined to attract new works to its collection? Where are its capacities strong with regards to exhibition development, storage, conservation, touring, interpretation? How can these be leveraged to attract new contributions of artwork? Is this asset-based cultural development? Yes, but it’s seeing a different set of assets when looking to the community, and it’s starting from an institutionally driven vision and value system, not a community-driven vision and value system.

Asset-based thinking and planning are effective strategies when employed inward to focus on organizational development goals. However, this is just another way of doing business. What I want to stress and put forward as truly radical change for our field is the application of asset-based approaches in our cultural work, as represented above by the community arts center director.

Opposing Approaches to Cultural Practice

I define two basic and opposing approaches to cultural work. One I call cultural imperialism, the other cultural empowerment. There are a lot of gray areas and in the practice of either, there is inevitable dialogue through which the cultural practices of all participating parties change or evolve as a result of the contact. Cultural imperialism, as the word suggests, is about assuming superiority and imposing control. It uses a position of power to appropriate from others things that benefit the dominant culture. It’s about viewing, advocating and advancing the values and aesthetics of one cultural group over others. While it isn’t strictly unidirectional, it is about power accruing to the dominant player.

Empowerment is something a bit more elusive. As a term it suggests that one party has power and is granting it to another. In reality it involves people working together to build, take or somehow accrue power, and it typically is power leading to self-determination. As a cultural practice it is about seeking equity and balance to benefit all players.

Cultural institutions, legitimately created as social entities and vehicles to perpetuate the practices and values of their founders, teach, advocate and indoctrinate people into a particular way of seeing and experiencing the world. Institutions believe their cultural practices and point of view embody great significance – representing the best of human artistic expression and intellectual rigor – and that others will benefit if they come to appreciate and enjoy this fact. They may have a rigid epistemology or a progressive one. They may work to promote one form or to seek the values in many. This is not a simple black-or-white or good-or-bad scenario, but most institutions tend towards the rigid side.

Applying asset-based approaches in community settings where living cultures are practiced, guided by values around respect for all people, exemplifies the empowerment model. At a time when many 20- to 30-year-old community-based or “alternative” arts organizations are trying to “institutionalize” themselves for future generations, it’s a good time to examine their values and practices in this context.

Although the language may be unfamiliar, the community-based arts field has many fine examples of asset-based cultural and community development practice. This means we see and value the multiple cultures in our communities and the ways they’re expressed. Using our value-laden filters we look for their strengths and for ways they can contribute to community building and social justice. We actively work to learn about them and to exchange ideas. In practice we celebrate and nurture the talents of those we identify as “artists” who come from within these cultural communities – people who regularly practice and share a form of expression that is indigenous to their place or people – and we honor these practices by sharing and learning about them through public presentations, classes and the like.

Community arts practitioners carry out these practices against a backdrop of organizing and advocating for social justice. Most of the cultures and practitioners we embrace are defined in the U.S. as outsiders. They’re denigrated, excluded or disenfranchised economically, politically and socially. Celebrating cultural practices that originate from outside the mainstream is itself an act of defiance – an assertion that they’re as worthy of a platform and recognition as are cultural practices of the heretofore privileged. This is asset-based cultural practice and this is why it is inherently radical.

A Tool to Overcome the Idea of Cultural Supremacy?

To be fair, many working in the arts mix missionary zeal with an eagerness to learn from and support talents they recognize in others. Multiculturalism has hammered home the point that culture does not emanate from a single or narrowly defined source – though church-inspired institutions might lead one to believe otherwise. Urgently needed dialogue has opened on the value and role of art in societies, the forms culture takes, intrinsic and instrumental impacts of art, and the multiple relationships people have to art and culture.

What I assert is that asset-based cultural practices fly in the face of the deeply embedded, centuries old notion of Western cultural supremacy and the principles governing institutions that were established to reinforce it.

For today’s nonprofit and civic leaders, adopting an asset-based approach, in management practices and especially in cultural practices, does not happen overnight. Most in the current generation have been trained to see problems and shortcomings as the starting point for change-making, fundraising and organizational development. This is one place most public and private funding agencies were long complicit in institutionalizing deficit-based models – rewarding an emphasis on problems and lavishing attention on community and organizational shortcomings.

In this respect, the Hip-Hop generation (not the one promoted by the recording industry) may be far better equipped to move towards the light instead of the darkness. As a culture and as a value system, Hip-Hop grew from an asset-based approach, making new music from old records and discarded turntables, telling stories with skilled combination and delivery of words, creating dance on a piece of cardboard on the street, and painting enormous colorful murals with a few cans of liberated spray paint and appropriated canvases. Practitioners from this cultural milieu use what they have and are masters of creative re-use and remixing. This kind of creativity is not new to marginalized populations. However, it has not been heralded as an asset in itself but cited as examples of depravity or evidence of a lack of access to legitimate culture.

The good news is that the community-based arts field, which is largely artist-led, is asset-rich when it comes to leading this kind of change. I begin with the premise that artists are the original masters of asset-based thinking and action. In taking raw materials and imaginatively enhancing them or adapting them to other uses, artists enhance value and change meaning. These fundamental skills can so enrich asset-based practices across sectors! Beginning with any manner of materials, including things that may have been discarded by others, artists create beauty, profound meaning, and worth well beyond the cost of the ingredients. They transform words, sounds, images, movements, and objects, even entire city blocks. And, in so many ways, they transform people and communities.

Remarkable artists such as Lily Yeh of Philadelphia’s Village of Arts and Humanities, Rick Lowe of Houston’s Project Row Houses or Detroit’s Tyhre Guyton, have done just that. Incredible practitioners such as Liz Lerman, John Malpede, Judy Baca, Dudley Cocke, Brian Freeman, John O’Neal and so many others begin with the raw material of movement, stories and images rooted deep in the human experience and make powerful art. The community and youth video movements, and countless highly motivated and talented community artists across the globe, epitomize asset-based thinking and practice.

And still they struggle for recognition and financial support in spite of work that is so profound and important because their core practice – seeing, acknowledging and lifting up the cultural assets of disenfranchised people and groups – challenges the status quo of cultural and economic privilege that is presently on an aggressive forward march in the U.S.

Cultural and Social Change Workers Unite!

As a pleasant surprise to those in the arts who were aware of the Kretzmann McKnight work, artists and arts organizations factor prominently in their framework as community assets, an unusual acknowledgement from the community development field. Most politically left-leaning social-change workers have, at best, ignored the arts, or at worst considered them part of the dreaded establishment and a drain on resources needed for more important work. This dichotomy set up a tension that only favored reactionary interests as it prevented committed activists from different fields from working together.

For better and worse, a newer generation of developers and public officials have begun to recognize value in the arts inspired in part by economist Richard Florida and his ideas about the “creative class.” While this provides an entree for some artists and arts organizations to move into expanded roles in their communities, it again puts them largely at the service of forces interested more in attracting and accumulating wealth for the already privileged.

In some corners of the Left there’s a long and wonderful tradition of working with artists. Labor organizers allied with musicians, muralists and poets. Environmental movements joined with – and were motivated by – photographers, writers, singers and filmmakers. But essentially these artists served to publicize events, inform audiences and rally the troops – just as other artists did for the government, military or church. These progressive-artist alliances were productive but by and large didn’t translate to deeper understanding and integration of culture into these movements.

Institutional arts in the U.S. have largely aligned with ruling-class interests for whose discretionary financial support they’re beholden. So, it’s no surprise that most progressive activists have not jumped into bed with those working in art or culture. As a social-change activist who felt the arts were vital and effective in making change on many levels, this caused me years of frustration. Simply saying the word "art" in mixed company could cause comrades to either walk away or go on a tirade about bourgeois values and self-indulgence. And sometimes they were right. The idea of art as simply decorative, entertaining or potentially enlightening for the already educated is still predominant in this sector.

It remains a challenge to have a serious conversation with a progressive colleague about the importance of culture and cultural change. Corporate executives trying to exploit global workforces or alter the work ethic of an older industry are much more enthusiastic and astute conversation partners. In fact, corporate human-resource-development departments have become major employers of artists.

Conclusion

Building communities is the larger endeavor in which community arts practitioners are engaged. At the same time cultural work is integral – perhaps even the essence of – community building. One of the things community arts practitioners do well is to recognize and put to work creative talents in individuals, the workplace and communities. They’ve devised a variety of remarkably creative artistic techniques and organizational practices to carry on this process. What they’ve sometimes lacked is a sense of the importance of their practices to other sectors – the things their work can both offer to and learn from other social change practitioners.

Unfortunately, the feeling has been mutual. Putting a language to the process of identifying and leveraging community assets – cultural and otherwise – is an entrée into learning, exchange and, ultimately, collaboration.

Asset-based practice is a discipline – an art in itself. And it is where cultural practice intersects with progressive community organizing and development. It requires honing the skills to recognize attributes – cultural or otherwise – that contribute to community building. As cultural intermediaries we enter the conversation laden with our own values and goals, and we learn skills that – partnered with organizers and advocates sharing similar values – can bring new levels of effectiveness to the social-justice enterprise. Seeing assets, rather than deficits in one another, provides highly productive ground on which to build.

Tom Borrup is a consultant, writer, and educator based in Minneapolis. He was executive director of Intermedia Arts from 1980 to 2002 and a trustee of the Jerome Foundation from 1994 to 2003. He now consults with nonprofits, foundations, and public agencies nationally. His book, Creative Community Builders Handbook will be released in 2006 by Fieldstone Alliance (formerly Wilder Publishing).

[1]Kretzmann, John P. and John L. McKnight. "Building Communities from the Inside Out." Chicago, Ill.: ACTA Publications, 1993.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2005