Asset-Based Community Workshop in London, March 13 & 14 2019

This is the workshop you need to attend if you are involved with communities. It is the ABCD you need to promote Citizen Participation at a neighbourhood level. It is a two day workshop, hosted by Cormac Russell, exploring asset Based Community Development and Sarah Burns (Head of Communities) from Croydon Voluntary Action.

If you are not familiar with Cormac Russell, watch this amazing video of him where he explained how we can support community by helping each one of their members how special each of them are.

I was first introduced to the ABCD programme by a colleague of mine called Deana Wildgoose she run the Hero Project CIC where they empower communities with tools so they can reach their dr

" Nurture Development have mentored Croydon Voluntary Action (CVA) in Asset Based Community Development since early 2011. CVA have gained a wealth of local community building stories to share and are now delighted to partner with Nurture Development to offer a UK wide programme of accredited training for citizens, practitioners and agency leaders. This new training programme will start with a two-day workshop, hosted by Cormac Russell, exploring Asset Based Community Development." - Sarah Burns (Head of Communities), Croydon Voluntary Action


Asset-Based Community Development workshop in London, March 13 & 14, 2019. hashtag#ABCD: A Practical Guide to Promoting Citizen Participation at neighbourhood level. For every paying practitioner, a resident/citizen they serve receives a free place!

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/asset-based-community-development-workshop-for-london-those-working-in-vcses-voluntary-community-tickets-55269437375

My name is Marie Lefebvre. I  am writing because I want to come to your Asset-Based Community Development Workshop. 

I will be bold. I want a ''free'' place. 

Our community group - Leicester Fixers - nor myself can possibly afford £200. However, I know it will be valuable for our scheme.

I run Leicester Fixers, a community of amateur repairers who want to inspire people to use their gifts to fix their surrounding environment. I organise with a mere £1800 a Green Festival of Making and Mending which welcomed 600 people plus a serie of events throughout 2015. We ran approximately 25 repair cafes in Leicester. This year, we received a small grant from Leicestershire County Council to create 6 repair groups across Leicestershire. We have already created 5 in less than 6 months. I do not lack the energy for bringing people together. I am still to learn how to make it more financially viable.

It is primordial for us to scan the skills and abilities of our community. If I am aware of the tools available to me to strenghten my skills, it will be easier to recruit, inspire people to share their gifts. I want to do better in helping people to reflect on how special they are and training those around me to become better listeners. Often, people do not feel they are special because they do not make a living out of their skills. We have the issue when we do collaborative events with other organisations that our repair activities are less financially rewarded than food stalls, yet it has tremendous value in connecting people together. It can be demotivating for people to get involved any further. How can we distribute more evenly all assets a community has. How do we unlock some of the assets?

They are so many questions I need to have answer to.

I will ever so grateful if a place is made available for me to come along.

If it is not possible, please keep me on your mailing list, we never know how my situation and the group may evolve in the years to come. I will be for sure trying to come to one of your workshop.

Best wishes

We are delighted to announce this two-day workshop to all ABCD enthusiasts in the Greater London Area and to those working in VCSEs throughout the UK. We are particularly pleased to be offering this along with a wider programme of training with our strategic partners Croydon Voluntary Action. They have demonstrated exemplary commitment to the ABCD principles over the last eight years and have enabled asset based community driven change to take root in many neighbourhoods across Croydon. Together we look forward to demystifying the theory and the practice of Asset-based Community Development and supporting you to deepen your practice and impact.

This workshop will:

• Give you an understanding of the history of ABCD, relating it to your experience of community development.
• Explain the 5 guiding principles of ABCD in both theory and practice.
• Identify the 6 building blocks or assets of community building, exploring how these can be identified, connected and mobilised in the neighbourhood context.
• Share the 8 touch stones of community building, offering stories and examples of their application.
• Identify the ABCD Tools for Change: e.g. Learning Conversations & Asset Mapping.
• Involve you in activities and exercises that you can then use in practice where you live and/or work.
• Use stories and case studies of ABCD in action from our Learning Sites, in the UK and around the world, to highlight effective practice.

To learn more about ABCD in Action check out Cormac Russell's TEDx from Exeter 2016 click here

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This is the part of the Nurture Development series of UK-wide ABCD Workshops. We have intentionally organised the workshops to:

• Be the most affordable
• Most credible
• Most citizen and practitioners focused

Workshops on Asset-Based Community Development available anywhere in Europe. Our invitation to practitioners attending is to invite a resident you are working with, in a local neighbourhood, who you know to be passionate about community building and weaving their community together.

Lunch: Light lunch is provided

Cost: £200 per practitioner 

Duration: 10am - 4pm

Ticket holders are entitled to invite one member of their local community to join them on the two days at no additional cost.

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What is ABCD?

ABCD invites us to work beyond administrative boundaries and understand that people, their families and communities, have unique competencies that cannot be replaced by competent professional intervention. Since the only people who can build community are the people who live sleep and work there.

The starting point for communities, funders, commissioners, and practitioners isn't necessarily a different one, instead of starting with a focus on what’s wrong, ABCD invites us to start with a focus on what’s strong so that we can use what’s strong to address what’s wrong and make what’s strong even stronger.

That means paying attention to assets that build community connection and power. However, these assets might not always be apparent, in fact, they are often invisible. This workshop will pay attention to the importance of making the invisible visible, offering both underpinning theory and examples of practice.

For more details on the workshop format and programme please contact info@nurturedevelopment.org and to find out more about the ABCD approach itself click here