Asset mapping has a visibility problem. Not in the sense that practitioners are careless or communities are dishonest, but in the sense that any process of collective self-knowledge is shaped by who designed it and who it was designed to find. Most mapping processes, in communities, organisations, and NGOs alike, are extraordinarily good at locating assets that look like the majority already does.

The inventory is not the whole community

Community development grounded in assets gave us something genuinely valuable: a way of looking at what a community has rather than cataloguing only what it lacks. The shift from deficit thinking to practice grounded in strengths changed the terms of the work in important ways. But there is a limitation built into any mapping process that is easy to miss, and it has less to do with what gets written down than with who is visible enough to be written about at all.

Communities and organisations designed by and for the majority tend to be legible to themselves in particular ways. The assets they can see are the ones that present themselves in the dominant register: fluent speech, confident self-advocacy, physical presence at meetings, productivity recognisable to the mainstream. When Kretzmann and McKnight gave us tools to see community gifts, those tools were themselves shaped by assumptions about what a gift looks like and how it announces itself.

A visibility problem, not a deficit problem

People who are disabled, neurodivergent, living with illness of long duration, or who cannot yet speak the dominant language are not, in the main, poor in assets. They are invisible as asset holders, which is a categorically different situation and calls for a categorically different response.

The distinction matters enormously in practice. If the problem is deficit, the answer is provision: services, support, accommodation, charity. If the problem is visibility, the answer is instrument design: who is in the room, what counts as a contribution, how we create conditions in which different kinds of gift can be perceived at all. This applies as much to an international NGO designing a community consultation as it does to a neighbourhood group running its first mapping session.

McKnight and Block, in their later work together, pushed further than the original mapping frame had gone. Their concern was not just inventory but competence: what communities can do for themselves, and what gets quietly transferred to services and professionals when communities stop trusting their own capacity. The people most likely to be handed over to services rather than invited into community are precisely those whose contributions the centre cannot yet see. This is not coincidence. It is a structural feature of how communities and institutions organised by the majority tend to function.

What the instruments miss

A person who uses a wheelchair and cannot reach the upstairs meeting room is invisible to the mapping process held there, not because they have nothing to offer but because the room itself was designed as a filter. A person who processes the world differently from the neurotypical norm may not put their hand up in a fast-moving group discussion, but that does not mean they have nothing to say. A person who speaks limited English may be unable to articulate their local knowledge in the dominant tongue but may hold a quality of observation about community life that long-established insiders have entirely lost. In an NGO context, that same dynamic plays out between international staff and the communities they are nominally serving.

The social model of disability offers a reframe here that extends well beyond disability itself. The model argues that it is not impairment that disables people but the way environments, systems, and social arrangements are designed. Transpose that logic to community development and it becomes a sharper tool: the community or organisation is not discovering who has assets and who does not. It is discovering how its own design includes some people and excludes others. The question shifts from what gifts does this person have to what would we need to change in order to perceive the gifts already present.

Redesigning for perception

This is not a call for accommodation in the familiar sense, the ramp bolted on after the building is finished. It is something more fundamental: designing the processes by which a community or organisation comes to know itself, so that those processes can detect a wider range of signal. Smaller gatherings rather than open meetings. Individual conversations as a legitimate form of participation. Multiple languages, visual methods, contribution that happens in people’s own time rather than in a fixed slot. Time built in for people who need more of it.

When communities and organisations do this well, they do not simply become more inclusive in some administrative sense. They become more accurate. The picture they hold of their own resources gets closer to the truth. And the decisions they make from that picture get correspondingly better. This is not charity. It is a correction to an information problem the centre did not know it had.

A question to sit with today

Think of a community, organisation, or NGO you are part of or work alongside. What would need to change about its processes for knowing itself — its mapping, its consultation, its meeting design — for gifts currently invisible to the centre to become visible? And what might it be getting wrong, right now, precisely because those gifts are not yet in the picture?

Inspiration

  • Kretzmann, J.P. and McKnight, J.L. (1993) Building communities from the inside out: a path toward finding and mobilising a community’s assets. Chicago: ACTA Publications.
  • McKnight, J. and Block, P. (2010) The abundant community: awakening the power of families and neighbourhoods. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
  • Oliver, M. (1990) The politics of disablement. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
  • Oliver, M. and Barnes, C. (2012) The new politics of disablement. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.