Insights
Insights
Four Foundational Claims
1. Community development is asset management. The relevant question is not "what are we spending?" but "what are we building?" A community's capital position — across nine distinct forms of capital — determines its capacity to grow, absorb shocks, and recover from disruption.
2. Capital assets interact as a system. Weakness in one type cascades to others. The framework only works if it is read as a whole — as a balance sheet, not a checklist.
3. Disaster management is a special use case of community development — not a separate system. Communities that are building capital effectively are communities that recover. The determinants of recovery success and development success are largely the same.
4. One-size-fits-all fails. Communities are on different development tracks. The same intervention produces radically different results depending on a community's starting capital position. Effective strategy requires segmentation.
"Most of the time, when a disaster happens, it does not create the crisis. It reveals the one that was already there."
— ISD Community Assets Framework
THE FRAMEWORK
Nine Capital Types. One Balance Sheet.
Every community holds a portfolio of assets across nine distinct dimensions. Understanding where those assets are strong — and where they are depleted — is the first step in any serious development or recovery strategy.
