My graduate advisor and I were once talking about Marx and the fact that the spontaneous proletarian he predicted would occur was obviously not going to. He looked at me and said—“Look at how Marx described the proletariat. It was always in negative terms. They lacked this or that; they used religion as an opiate, and are reduced to an animal-like existence. Who would want to be a member of such a group?”

As I keep wrestling with the idea of “vulnerable populations” that has become so ubiquitous in disaster literature, I wonder out loud if the very term “vulnerable” is a good one to use. I doubt that anyone would like to be characterized as such and probably don’t think of themselves that way either.

In 1993, John McKnight and John Kretzmann published Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets. They were specifically reacting to the growing practice of doing “needs analyses” in our poor, vulnerable communities. In doing needs analysis, we concentrate on what the communities don’t have. In doing what they called “asset analysis or mapping,” the focus on what they do have.

Most of the analyses of vulnerable populations tend to incorporate negatives—implicitly saying what they need. Income is likely low. Educational achievement is lower than average. There may be large numbers of single-parent households and a large number of renters. It is easy to see what they don’t have—more difficult to see what they do have.

A few years ago, Rev. Bill Stanfield moved his wife and kids into Chickora Cherokee, a North Charleston neighborhood, and founded a nonprofit called “Metanoia.” He looked at what the community did have—the capacity to become more self-sufficient. He followed John McKnight’s observation in The Careless Society that large numbers of social service providers meeting “needs” in a community tended to weaken it rather than strengthen it. Slowly, Metanoia has promoted grass roots, community engagement and has built a much stronger and more resilient community by building on assets, not meeting needs.

The point here is relatively simple. As long as we focus on a community’s needs or vulnerabilities, we neglect to see what it has in the way of assets. Many poor, rural communities may be wealthy in social capital—and more and more analysts are seeing how critical this asset is in disaster recovery. Social capital may exist in the form of tight bonds among a group, the presence of extended families, and frequented “third places” like a barbershop, beauty shop, or diner.

Where social capital is created, it can be used as a building block to improve lives. Neighbors might begin to use neighborhood handymen rather than outside contractors. Metanoia provides daycare where the caregivers are community residents and operates a farmer’s market where residents can sell vegetables and crafts that they grow or make.

 There can be little question that these steps have all increased Chickora Cherokee’s resilience even though it still has many needs and would be characterized as vulnerable. I’m sure that the residents are looking at what they do have rather than what they don’t

CARRI is all about promoting more community self-sufficiency. You can’t do that by constantly looking at what you don’t have.