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Resilience is an increasingly important concept that contributes to sustainability and wellbeing of a community. Asset-based community development (ABCD) may offer promising approaches to boosting community resilience in Australia, especially within marginalised groups.

A scoping review was conducted to conceptualise existing literature on ABCD approaches to building resilience. Research databases were searched with relevant details.

Thirty-three sources were identified as meeting the inclusion criteria and were reviewed in terms of six themes: integration and identity, health, mental health, education, employment and community planning. Issues identified by the literature within these themes can be alleviated through asset-based approaches. Implications for planning of asset-based programs and policy change are discussed in light of the findings.

The results of this study provide several implications for practise, policy recommendations and future research into this area. Results suggest that increasing capacity around asset-based coping mechanisms, such as support networks through religious and cultural groups, would promote community development and foster resilience. Furthermore, policy on refugees in multiple areas, such as psychological service provision and employment, should be redesigned in a way that acknowledges their complex and diverse needs and facilitates their integration into the community. Though multiple ways to achieve this goal have been explored in literature, a sustained and broader approach is necessary to see widespread change. Further research and funding are required to explore and implement appropriate responses. Based on the findings and discussion above, the authors make the following policy recommendations. Service providers need to be aware of and incorporate culturally appropriate programs in the areas of mental health assessment and intervention, education and employment. The trauma-informed approach should be used when dealing with refugee groups and other groups who have faced hardships. Government policy should focus on improving community engagement to create and strengthen social networks, which are vital in boosting integration into the community and increasing health education and access to services. Government should focus on asset-based approaches in designing education and employment integration programs to promote social belonging and community engagement, and thus, community resilience, which will consequently have beneficial individual and group outcomes. The current governmental policy surrounding refugees should be overhauled with the goal of successful refugee integration in mind, such as incorporating the ability for refugees to access vital services such as employment and skills transferability programs. Due to current policy, these services are inaccessible to a large portion of refugees, hindering their integration. Government needs to create specific guidelines for the provision of psychological services to refugees to improve the quality of mental health services available to this group.

This paper comprises an original data analysis of the relevant existing literature by the project team. The process was rigorous, and no content of the analysis has been published previously except the material published by other authors. All previously published materials were duly acknowledged.

International attention is increasingly turning to the challenge of creating age-friendly environments. This study aims to examine the application of asset-based approaches in undertaking community development projects with older people. The paper intends to share the learning that may be useful when designing community development projects for older people in the future.

This study followed a multiple project case study design, with a focus on project delivery practices. It was undertaken as a co-production exercise involving university researchers and trained older volunteer community researchers (CRs). Over 18–24 months of qualitative research was conducted in relation to six area-based urban projects between 2018 and 2020.

There were five leading themes as follows: mapping and building on assets in highly localised settings; creating governance and direction through steering groups; developing activities with diverse groups of older people; reaching isolated and lonely older people; building local capacity to embed sustainability.

The effectiveness of assets-based approaches in promoting age-friendly agendas appears to be contingent on the values, skills, capacity and resourcing of delivery agencies, alongside wider public sector investment in communities. Diversity and inequalities amongst older people need to be taken into account and community development that specifically focuses on older people needs to be balanced with the whole population and intergenerational practice.

This paper provides an empirical account of the practical application of assets practices specifically in the context of the age-friendly community agenda. The co-production method brings together insights from academic and volunteer older CRs.

Academic BIPOC librarians oftentime struggle to envision themselves and navigate in White-dominant spaces due to deficit thinking. To better understand how DEIA efforts can bolster structural change in academic libraries, the two BIPOC authors opted to lean on an asset-based exercise–imagining a positive work environment made possible through a library staffed entirely by BIPOC individuals.

Through collaborative autoethnography, the two authors interviewed one another and centered their unstructured conversations around one question: “What does an academic library composed entirely of a BIPOC workforce look like?” Three emergent themes were agreed upon and finalized by the two authors.

The authors' imagined library is able to foster a supportive community and also function efficiently thanks to its shared purpose grounded in DEIA. Despite relying on an asset-based framework, the authors found themselves having to reckon with trials and tribulations currently faced by BIPOC librarians. Effectively envisioning the “ideal” library environment is not possible without also engaging with librarianship's legacy of racial injustices.

Recognizing that confronting systems of oppression naturally invokes trauma, this paper encourages librarians to challenge deficit thinking and instead rely on asset-based models to candidly imagine an anti-racist academic library. The authors acknowledge that BIPOC voices and experiences add tremendous value to the library workplace. At the heart of this paper is the belief that reparations for past racial injustices should not only fix past wrongdoings, but also contribute to positive workplace cultures.

This paper seeks to outline the ways in which the desire to age well is inextricably linked to the domains of community and associational life; relies for its strength on intimate, soft, human contact in addition to more distant, cold, professional services; can call on an abundance of untapped, local‐based care and, with greater intentionality by policy makers and practitioners, can lead to better physical and mental health outcomes for senior citizens.

The paper is a reflection piece based on the proven qualities of asset‐based community development as a process for convening conversations in communities – from which the latent, caring capacities of individuals and associations are unleashed – allowing communities to build from the inside out. Communities define an ageing well agenda for their locale and implement that agenda according to their capacities.

The paper finds that citizens and communities co‐producing health outcomes will out‐perform individuals reliant on professional medical services only.

Communities have immense resources for health creation; tapping those resources leverages more health benefits than professional medical interventions alone.

The paper challenges the omnipotent, medicalised, “sickness” model of healthcare and encourages the adoption of a model of healthcare in which citizens, older or otherwise, co‐produce healthy lifestyles and health outcomes in their communities with the assistance of professionals.

Considering the role of higher education in preparing the next generation of leaders for social change, leadership education is challenged to consider how best to prepare young adults for socially responsible leadership. Service-learning and professional internships, separately, have been identified as vehicles for preparing young adults for leadership roles. The purpose of this Application Brief is to describe a hybrid of service-learning and professional internships, called “Serviceship,” which employs undergraduate students as interns for a community rather than a company. Now in its fifth year at a Midwestern, four-year land-grant institution, the “Serviceship” program has placed 21 interns in 11 rural communities. Utilizing an asset-based community development framework, undergraduate students are matched with rural communities whose local leaders have self-identified a community development project.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how asset-based community development (ABCD) can be used to build inclusive, connected communities that intentionally value the contribution of older citizens.

ABCD was used as an approach to enable older people to transform their neighbourhood and make them a better place to live for all ages. The paper describes this approach and goes on to illustrate how it has been applied in three neighbourhoods using case studies.

The case studies show that by using ABCD, connections can be made between people, associations/clubs, businesses and services, to achieve the aspirations the citizens have for their neighbourhood. The contribution of older citizens to community life is valued and the risk of isolation and loneliness reduced.

The three case studies presented in this paper are unique in that they have applied ABCD with older people taking on the role of community builders and connectors.

There has been a range of initiatives in South Africa aimed at determining how community-based approaches such as Community Asset Management (CAM) can be enabled and supported through mainstream public infrastructure delivery and development practice. One of the critical issues emerging is around the need to clarify and specify roles and processes in CAM projects where the effective role of the community itself is central to the success and sustainability of projects. This paper calls attention to the importance of community participation and empowerment in these development projects, and begins to highlight the paradigm shift that this would require with respect to professional roles in the delivery of the built environment.

As a first step towards better defining the new roles and structures that are required, this paper identifies the prevailing attitudes and perceptions of the traditional built environment professionals in South Africa towards participatory projects. In so doing it draws upon a survey whose findings are presented and used as a basis for determining the key obstacles and constraints facing professionals in the effective implementation of participatory, community-based projects.

The conclusions and recommendations offered are intended as considerations for researchers and development agents who are grappling with the complex but critical issues of how to enable effective asset-based community development.

The purpose of this paper is to present alternative ways of addressing inequality in age-friendly work by drawing attention to the limitations of place-based approaches in meeting the needs of dispersed communities.

A case study of the age-friendly programme Ambition for Ageing (AfA) is used to explore three examples of working with minority communities.

Place-based age-friendly development risks further marginalising older people belonging to dispersed communities of identity or experience; therefore, we need to adopt adopt an intersectional approach to inequality in later life.

Three ways that age-friendly programmes may become more inclusive of minority groups who are geographically dispersed are identified: bringing community members together; co-production; and supporting visibility in mainstream settings.

This paper brings together insights from the AfA programme, critically assessing place-based approaches in relation to working with dispersed communities of identity. It offers some ways to mitigate limitations through adopting tailored equality approaches.

Programmes to promote alcohol awareness and harm reduction in the general population often take an atomised approach, encouraging individual drinkers to understand their unit intake and adjust it accordingly. Although many public health practitioners harbour doubts about the value of this approach, few clear alternatives have emerged. The purpose of this paper is to provide such an alternative.

Alcohol Concern’s Communities Together project was rooted in the idea that drinking patterns can only be understood in their social context. It was an attempt to take seriously Harold Holder’s injunction to “cease to focus narrowly on the individual and begin to adopt broader community perspectives on alcohol problems”. The project applied Asset-Based Community Development methods, handing a large degree of control over to the participants, drawing on their own talents and enthusiasms, and recognising their autonomy and their authority as experts in their own lives.

The project outputs have been described as “community development with an alcohol twist”. They included a range of activities and events that created inclusive and non-judgemental spaces for people to think about alcohol and draw their own conclusions. It was also a lesson in humility for those of us who like to consider ourselves as the experts in public health: we had to learn that we did not have all the answers to questions about other people’s lives.

The project indicates that community development may be a valid alternative to more traditional and more didactic approaches to alcohol harm reduction.

The project may provide an innovative and flexible model that could be applied in various communities in order to address alcohol misuse in an engaging and undogmatic fashion that helps people take more control of their own lives.

The purpose of this paper was to provide a discussion on using sport events for community development through the lenses of community development theories and perceived event impacts.

The nature of the paper was not based on a specific methodology or design, rather on a review of relevant studies that aim to support strategies of how to develop a community through the hosting of sport events utilizing community development theories.

The review revealed that the profile of the community could influence the use of asset or needs-based community theory to achieve community development goals associated with hosting certain size of sport events.

The combination of community development theories with the literature in sport event impacts and legacies provides a novel approach to the discussion of community development through sport events.