Professor Jody Kretzmann Public Lecture

12 July 2007

With new residential developments and commercial enterprises changing the nature of inner-city Newcastle, the issue of how to integrate new and old communities is topical. On July 12th, an expert in building communities addressed this issue in a public lecture, and told how the community should focus on its own unique combination of assets in order to support and build its future.

Professor Jody Kretzmann from the Asset-Based Community Development Institute, and the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, Illinois U.S.A., told the audience that effective community development needs local people who are committed to investing themselves and their resources in the community development effort. To integrate the new into the old, a community must replace old understandings of "needs" and "deficits" and begin to assemble its strengths. This approach, called Asset-Based Community Development, recognises that communities are not built from the top down or from the outside in, but from the inside out.