How to Ask Better Community Questions: It’s as Easy as ABCD

In this conversation Joel Zaslovsky discusses with Cormac Russell:

• Why our unexpressed gifts can do tremendous harm.
• How an institutionalized five-year-old changed Cormac’s life direction.
• Why community makes a better verb than a noun.
• How to get past the sense that someone’s either trying to sell you something or sell you out.
• The two words that simply summarize Asset-Based Community Development.
• How to have conversations that respect the past and present, but aren’t held captive by either.
• When to show up as a host or guest in someone’s life.
• How to ask better questions about and within your communities.
• Why consumer culture is actually an anti-culture.
• Why emphasizing discoverables is better than focusing on deliverables.
• How Asset-Based Community Driven Efforts may be the next evolution of ABCD.

Timestamps for discussion topics:

• [03:17] How I think about community and my sense of belonging
• [12:41] Cormac’s seeds of awesomeness
• [19:23] How being an orphan informs Cormac’s ABCD work
• [24:23] How Cormac’s background in psychology and “community care” led him to ABCD
• [29:31] The essence of ABCD
• [33:30] Community as a verb, not a noun
• [39:38] The tension between trust and privacy
• [52:02] The limits of ABCD and discoverables over deliverables

Republished with the kind permission of Joel Zaslofsky.

Find out more about this conversation: originally published  – How to Ask Better Community Questions: It’s as Easy as ABCD with Cormac Russell – SASM 127

Find out more about Joel and his community: http://joelzaslofsky.com/