Changing Minds and Hearts: Innovation in Asset Mapping

Asset mapping is not new. If you’re a sociologist, anthropologist, urban planner, or social scientist, you use some form of asset mapping to capture qualitative data. The application of asset mapping, in collaboration with indigenous leadership, can build the trust needed to produce new results. At Rivera Consulting, Inc. and NextShift, Inc., with the ongoing partnership from the MIT Co-Lab, we have co-developed an innovative asset mapping curriculum that combines best practices from the Bronx Community Development Initiative’s Economic Democracy Learning Center, popular education, social science, and participatory action research that supports social change agency, self-determination, sustainable community engagement and cross sector collaboration.  

As activist academics at Rivera Consulting Inc., asset mapping serves as an instrument for individual capacity building of a community to develop the collective agency, identifying and developing their community's assets and their own solutions. Our strategists serve the community through strategic planning, project discovery, development, and coaching to co-develop asset mapping tools that supports indigenous community leadership to co-develop and co-pursue their shared vision and tools. Even more important, it builds the physical and figurative space required for the cultivation of trust among people. If we want the work to live beyond reports, to replicate and sustain the work, it needs to live in the hands of communities and stakeholders with decision-making authorities. 

Our recent and current clients, Community Care Brooklyn and Asociación de Vecinos y Amigos del Casco Antiguo (AVACA) are all living examples the of how asset mapping can be leveraged to change minds and hearts to impact policy and/or system transformation and change. Influenced by deep democracy, the asset mapping curriculum developed for each initiative uses mindfulness and popular education to reveal how our hearts contain knowledge that can incrementally unearth new ideas and approaches to complex social issues while simultaneously supporting the co-creation and co-development of community-led people centered research. For more information on both projects, visit Community Care Brooklyn and  Santa Ana Lidera. 

At Rivera Consulting Inc., asset mapping is an example of decolonizing social science for communities to lead their own change. We develop sustainable learning hubs, where the tougher work of relationship building, mistakes, and iteration manifest - cyclically at best. Ultimately, it’s about taking the asset mapping tool and infusing it with pedagogy, a heart, and an action plan. 

'Unbought and Unbossed': Creating New Opportunities and Getting Results

Six years ago, I walked away from professional politics. I was feeling burned out and tokenized. It was time to take a leap of faith and create the opportunities that the parochial underbelly of Massachusetts often designates for the establishment. I took my talents and vision as both a political strategist and urban planner to focus on policy intervention, planning, and social change education. 2017 was a culmination point in this journey and a successful year for our clients.

In Santa Ana, Panama, the agent curriculum developed developed for Conservatorio  and AVACA (called “Convocatorias para el aprendizaje del cambio social) was funded by the United States Embassy, unleashing a new sustainability initiative, Santa Ana Lidera. This initiative is anchored by my clients in addition to Voces Vitales, Futbol con Corazon, FXB and Fundacion Esparanza de San Felipe. 

In Brooklyn, we successfully completed a second asset mapping and participatory action research led by 50 high school and undergraduate students from Central Brooklyn for Interfaith Medical Center and Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, with a final report coming soon. What began as an experiment for Community Care Brooklyn in community-based research, has now become a permanent community engagement and cross sector collaboration strategy.

In Boston, we led the first all fare boarding pilot on the SL4/SL5 in coordination with the MBTA. (see Boston Globe: “All-door boarding made Silver Line buses move a little quicker.") In a matter of six weeks, Barr Foundation and our team of consultants hired outreach workers and designed a qualitative survey – supported by an integrated social media and communication campaign. Simultaneously, we launched a new pilot partnership program that will witness additional Gold Standard bus rapid transit pilots in Greater Boston while making the public policy case from the MBTA.

In Manhattan, we successfully designed a union dues campaign for the largest health care workers union in the country, 1199 Service Employees International Union.

In addition to watching my clients succeed, I also witnessed, along with other Americans of all stripes, mass youth-based and women of color led movements, a complicit Congress and an authoritarian President attack the fundamental values and institutions of our democracy. This unsettled me and brought me back to professional politics. The emergence of Trump did not begin in 2016, it is connected to decades of lost Democratic seats at the local, legislative, judicial and state level. This I know is true.

• Democratic control of state legislative and governor’s offices is the lowest since the 1900s;

• In 2008, Democrats controlled 59 percent of state legislatures, while now they control only 31 percent;

• Looking at the same time period, Democrats held 29 governor’s offices, and now we only have 16;

• Be wary of those that want to hold the Electoral College solely responsible. Democrats lost over 1,000 seats over the course of the Obama Administration, most of which did not involve the Electoral College;

• Finally, by successfully redrawing districts, Republicans have tilted the electoral map to their benefit;

The good news, is that the work is underway to transform our country and Rivera Consulting, Inc. is at the forefront, emerging as leaders that will support this generation of change agents – whether it’s changing hearts, helping elect more Democratic women and people of color, or transformative policy change to create a more sustainable earth.