Naming the Features of a Relational Community Engagement Strategy: Mapping Community Assets and Identifying Flows of Power

Photo by Daniele Franchi on Unsplash

Note: This is part of an ongoing occasional series on understanding Relational Community Engagement Strategies for organizations that are committed to authentic social impact. Please read more about Relational Community Engagement here.

Relational community engagement is related in many ways to asset-based community development (ABCD). Both seek to uncover, cultivate, and lift a community’s assets rather than reduce people to a need or deficit because both outlooks prioritize people, not projects. While relational community engagement does not ignore problems faced by residents, it refuses to only look at issues and needs. Rather than focusing solely on problems, a relational approach uncovers existing strengths within a community.

However, relational community engagement is also concerned with assets within a given community because these are a significant source of a community’s power. This one of the reasons why asset mapping is so widely used in asset-based community development because the assumption is that assets, once inventoried and mapped, can be used, shared, and configured in such a way as to create forms of power for the community to use in achieving its (hopefully) collaborative goals. This is only true, however, when asset maps can be operationalized and used to shape intentional power strategies. Unfortunately, this often does not happen because of the required time commitments.

Although asset maps are trendy in ABCD, they often provide little, if any, practical benefits for communities whose assets have been mapped unless they are activated and acted upon in intentional and collaboratively deliberate ways. Despite their potential, asset maps often remain unactivated for various reasons — funding runs out, priorities shift, or a collaborative impasse sets in (thanks to Guilia Molinengo for this term), to name a few. More than a few asset mapping activities result in maps or simple lists only to be filed away or placed on a shared drive, never seen or opened again.

Asset maps hold no value if there is no plan to activate them.

One suggestion I like as an activation primer for asset mapping is to identify how assets are currently shared between actors in a community: the individuals, organizations, associations, nonprofits, and businesses within a community. Communities commonly circulate assets in nuanced ways that often go unnoticed, even though they are part of what allows us to operate effectively within society. These assets are a type of social currency, those gifts, talents, and resources that become forms of power when they circulate. Circulation of assets is one form of community-based power, and exploring how these assets circulate can lead to fascinating conversations and strategies.

This circulation of power is what the researcher mentioned earlier, Guilia Molinengo, calls a flow of power:

A flow of power is a chain of actions, originating from one initial act of power and including the responses of other actors — be they participants, conveners, or facilitators — that contribute to the ongoing interplay…

Attempting to map the circulatory pathways of assets — power — within a community also, importantly, reveal the “subtleties of power, which may be overlooked if we only consider outcomes rather than the processes that engender these outcomes.”

There are a few techniques you can use to begin visualizing the flows of power. Power Mapping is a common technique used to identify and locate sources of power within a community and make a visual, explicit connection between community-based assets and community-based power. I like to take power mapping further by integrating an ecosystem mapping influence. Ecosystem maps are “a visual representation of a process, flow, or system that highlights relationships in a particular context.” By drawing literal lines or arrows between community actors who exchange assets — gifts, talents, stories, favors, food, and money — on a regular or semi-regular basis, we can begin to create a visual flow of power. This practice is particularly generative when an entire wall or floor can be used as a writing surface (perhaps covered in paper or cardboard). Still, there are also digital ecosystem mapping tools available, such as Miro and the Ecosystem Mapping Tool from Danish Design Center.

By identifying and tracing these circulations and exchanges, we begin to reveal the flows of power generated from mutual beneficence and collaborative participation in a community focused on abundance. Identifying power sources is the first step to determining how to direct power. Or, we might begin to reveal where assets are not circulating and redirect efforts to understand who is being left, generating more connectedness and community power.

The outcome of mapping assets and flows of power provides an actionable resource that can be used to strategize how the community can use its assets and power to achieve mutually desired goals. However, participation in mapping assets and flows is also valuable. Being a part of a process that begins to reveal and visualize the many ways people and organizations exchange gifts and resources is a grounding activity that fosters recognition of social connections. Creating and contributing to a map is a way of identifying not only how others are connected but also how we might be connected, reminding us that we each have a place in the relational power of community.