Five Action Strategies
Creating Positive Change through Community Initiatives
After years of studying community
change and learning
alongside communities committed to making change happen, Search
Institute has named five Action Strategies that new and
ongoing initiatives can use to guide the work they do in their own
towns,
cities, or regions.
Using the Five Action Strategies
Community initiatives based on the Developmental Assets
work thoughtfully to determine how
people in
all spheres of life can be involved. What keeps an initiative vibrant
is the
relationships that develop between the adults and young people in each
sphere
and in the networks of adults formed across those spheres.
The five Action Strategies provide a practical
approach to
identifying, encouraging, and linking all the important people, places,
activities, and programs necessary for a powerful collective effort.
With a
focused initiative, you can intensify your efforts to:
- Engage
adults from all walks of life to develop sustained,
strength-building
relationships with children and adolescents, both within families and
in
neighborhoods.
- Mobilize
young people to use their power as asset builders and change
agents. This
means listening to their input and including them in decision making.
- Activate
sectors of the community-such as schools, congregations,
businesses, and
youth, human service, and health-care organizations-to create an
asset-building
culture and to contribute fully to young people's healthy development.
- Invigorate
programs to become more asset rich and to be available to and
accessed by
all children and youth.
- Influence
civic decisions by influencing decision makers and opinion leaders
to
leverage financial, media, and policy resources in support of this
positive
transformation of communities and society.
As you think about these five Action
Strategies, you will
notice that they are not tasks to complete one by one in sequence.
Instead, as
you strengthen relationships within and between these spheres of
influence
across the community, you will build a web of interconnected efforts
that
support one another. Long-lasting success happens by merging the
asset-building
capacities of all community members-in all the settings where the lives
of
adults and youth intersect. It takes the combination of all five Action
Strategies to make lasting positive change.
Download
the Five Action Strategies (PDF)
