Camille Smith

EXPL 390

Miller

21 March 2018

ABCD Reflection

As an intern with Government Relations at Catholic Charities, I have quite

literally had the opportunity to see how our organization addresses community assets and

deficits. This is because much of my work, especially as of late, deals with our programs

and our grant proposals for these programs. In the grant proposals, we often have to have

a detailed account of our organization’s capacity, the assets of the neighborhood or

community that we want to implement the program in, and the demonstrated need of our

work in that place. Thus, both assets and deficits are essential to our work in Government

Relations because realistically, both need to be identified and understood in order to

utilize to make progressive change. Some of the primary assets we focus on when writing

a grant, similar to McKnight’s ABCD 101 lectures, include consulting local residents and

working with associations and institutions.

To be honest, I spend too much time focusing on deficits. I am someone who

strives to have a comprehensive understanding of how things work and how to improve

them. For example, when we were recently discussing the progress of Democrats in class

recently, it was hard for me not to get frustrated seeing how much they have fallen short

of their rhetoric in policy. While I stand by this, I also think that the Democrats have the

most organizing potential to actually make progressive change happen in policy, given

that they are the largest organization on the American political left. I am glad this project
has helped me refocus in order to think about using assets to catalyze change because it

helps me value both. Both are needed to make effective change. As the videos

highlighted, it’s important to ask how are people already making their communities better

and then build from there. This has not only shifted my perspective on working within

small communities, but large populations as well. For example, what are Americans

already doing to combat inequality and poverty? The movement to continue progress in

these areas starts from there. As it’s put in ABCD 101, three of the most important

aspects of learning from community building are acknowledging that the assets are there,

making new connections between assets, and seeing how different layers of the

community (individual people or groups) make connection between assets happen.

My work at Catholic Charities has shown me all of the different levels and groups

of people it takes to make change happen. It isn’t just the small team of three at

Government Relations that makes our programs happen, or the departments that execute

these programs. It’s all of these people, Board Members, volunteers, community

members, and the target population that all come together to keep a program functioning.

As McKnight said in the ABCD 101 video, the problem with most community

development approaches is that they focus on problems, and often its outside parties that

try to fix neighborhoods or communities. As someone on the Government Relations team

specifically, I have learned that my perspective must include these other groups’ points of

view, needs, and abilities. We strive not to be just an outside party, but rather a partner

that has the organizational resources and capacity to help deliver the change our target

populations needs. In order to improve in this way, I think we could have more formal,
yet still democratic organizations of community members that are directly affected by the

work we do that have representation at more of our meetings and functions.