- Community-Centered Services
- Community at the Center of Connected Learning
- Asset Framing
- Community-Centered Partnerships
- Rethinking Partnerships
- Gathering Data
- Asset Mapping
- Talking with the Community
- Analyzing and Using the Data
- Tools for Connecting Your Community
- Starting Conversations
- Combining Your Powers
- Making Plans Together
- Working with Different Types of Partners
- Ending a Partnership
- Community-Centered Services Workbook
- Additional Resources
Asset Mapping
Asset mapping is a systematic approach to getting to know the people, places, and resources that surround your library. It is a way to take stock of “the gifts, skills and capacities of individuals, voluntary associations, institutions, physical assets, local economy assets and stories in the community.” The community mapping process may draw on, among other sources of information,
- Interviews
- Surveys
- Focus groups
- Statistics about your community
- Business directories
- Driving or walking around
Learning more about all the people in your community (and not just those that already use the library) can help you
- Identify ways for the library to better meet the wants and needs of your community
- Find opportunities to reach new audiences
- Uncover groups that are not being reached by the library
Getting to know the associations, businesses, and other resources in your community can help you
- Find experts to mentor your teens or help with programs
- Discover physical resources you can leverage
- Understand what is available to your community from sources outside the library
- Identify or form relationships that can lead to partnerships
Driving or walking around as if you are new to the area can help you:
- Identify parts of the neighborhood or community that you currently take for granted or hadn’t even noticed
- Understand what is available to community members and how people spend their time.
- Recognize what business employ those who the library serves
Community mapping focuses on the strengths and assets of a community instead of on weaknesses and gaps, leading to unconventional programs that leverage a community’s unique strengths.
Low-capacity asset mapping
Your asset map doesn’t have to be far-reaching — you can choose how detailed it is based on your needs and your resources. A busy “everything librarian” in a rural one-room library can benefit from an asset-mapping project that takes one afternoon with a search engine.
Focusing on a very specific part of the community (for instance, “downtown” or “sports-related”) can help scale your efforts down to a manageable size. You can also consider it an interactive process — you can return to your map periodically to update or expand it.
Another way to make the job easier is to find out if someone from another organization has conducted a community mapping project before you and is willing to share their work.
Asset Mapping Examples and Resources
Community asset maps take many forms, from simple lists that fit on a single piece of paper to extensive reports and geographic maps. Plotting the resources and groups you discover on a map of your city or neighborhood may be useful and can inspire you to form out-of-the-box connections, but many community maps are much more simple. Look at the following examples for inspiration.