When engaging in macro-level systems change fair and equitable collaboration is key to a successful project. Active listening and crediting an individual’s contributions to group work is important to relationship building and shared understanding. Engaging with many diverse individuals and communities is inherent to our work as macro social workers, and protecting this exchange with open-mindedness can ensure a legacy of healthy, longstanding partnerships.

In fall 2019, our CCB cohort engaged in the critical analysis of several approaches to community development and capacity building efforts. To our dismay, many Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) programs, though valuable, addressed community development from a deficit and/or developer’s point of view and/or from a lens of out-group stakeholders. Even when a suggested ABCD approach to community development recognized community assets (utilizing a needs assessment or asset map), the approach failed to credit the full story of a community in need. Because many disadvantaged communities are communities of color, without recognizing the history of systemic oppression that disadvantages communities of color in the first place (i.e.: redlining and residential segregation, economic disinvestment, being forced to contend with high rates of environmental hazards, food deserts, etc.), our group felt any approach to ABCD would be tragically flawed.

Our group believed that we must teach practitioners of ABCD that there is another way; one that is the similar, but different: a Critical Race Theory-informed approach to ACBD. Without respect towards or buy-in from in-group community stakeholders, community development tends to be met with resistance, leading parties from both sides to give-up rather than give-in. However, our group felt that where developers and residents failed to see one another’s strengths (see Yosso’s approach to social capital), we believed reframing an ACBD approach with a CRT/I lens would bolster equity, equality and respect for in- and out-group stakeholders.