Publication Date

Spring 4-21-2017

Document Type

Poster

Keywords

community engagement, community development

Description

"The project is a partnership with the Malawi Children’s Mission (MCM), a feeding center and primary school that provides health care and emotional support services to 150 children who have been orphaned and their families in the rural villages of M'bwana, Jamali, and Mwazama. Asset-based community development (ABCD; Kretzman & McKnight, 1996) was used in the context of community engaged research to establish a sustainable university-assisted component of MCM through education abroad. ABCD relies upon individual and collective strengths and resources of community members to address the problems they define as needing attention, and has been used successfully in sub-Saharan Africa (Yeneabat & Butterfield, 2012). This project demonstrates how small scale community development informed by ABCD is an ethical and empowering approach that aims to reduce dependency on formal systems by using the talents and resources of the people to build a sense of hope and promote wellbeing and social and economic health. Binghamton University students and faculty took initial steps in ABCD during an education abroad trip to Malawi in 2016."

Disciplines

Civic and Community Engagement

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Learning your ABCDs: Asset-Based Community Development through Education Abroad and Community Engaged Research in Rural Malawi

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