Introduction
The Wildflowers curriculum on mapping social assets and program sustainability emerges from our observations that the most significant social impact is made when diverse assets in community are engaged to support program goals. This curriculum helps individuals and groups to see social assets in community, build on them, and develop an approach to engaging with a diversity of individuals and groups in a culturally appropriate manner. The curriculum also offers our framework and cultural skills required to harness the power of community.
We learned from communities that individuals draw from a host of strengths to help them in daily living. There are four major assets that are highlighted in this curriculum, and they serve as building blocks for sustainability. The first asset that communities identified is people and groups. This asset includes informal leaders, spiritual leaders, businesspeople, and community artists. Second, such individuals and their groups self-organized around naturally sustaining activities that foster community health and safety, family and social cohesion, and spiritual replenishment. Third, communities highlighted their identity and culture of social trust, healthy behavior, and financial growth. Fourth, local knowledge about people, places, and practices provided important perspectives and sustainable approaches to good nutrition and health, parenting, aging, learning, craftsmanship, and many other vitally important life lessons. These social assets are the foundation and pillars of a community. Once new ideas and approaches are expressed in self-organized ways, they take on a life of their own and yet are aligned and integrated with other activities that foster community growth and sustainability.
The Wildflowers curriculum starts with an introduction describing social assets in community. We offer a lens lens for seeing self-organized activities and for identifying the people who are involved in coordinating these activities. Such individuals and activities are often invisible to those outside the community but are the vital force behind the life and spirit of the community. We developed a leadership handbook that describes our framework for mapping assets and for viewing them in a broader context of building social and economic sustainability. Our curriculum focuses on East Palo Alto, California, as a way of describing how we understand communities. We provide an ethnographic study of the Latino population in East Palo Alto. Every indigenous, racial, and ethnic group has its own culture and its own self-organized activities, and the study on the Latino community offers an example of the influence of the culture on daily living. We review the history of the city and share demographic data from the 2000 census.
This curriculum is a product of the efforts of Wildflowers fellows in indigenous, ethnic, and racial communities in the United States and China and scholars in the University of California system. We are deeply grateful to all of them for their dedication and hard work in this endeavor.
Development of this curriculum came about as a result of a five-year project involving different indigenous, ethnic, and racial communities in the United States. We are very grateful to the following philanthropic organizations for their generous support of this endeavor: Akonadi Foundation, The California Endowment, Chrysopolae Foundation, Community Technology Foundation of California, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Dreyfus Health Foundation, The J. F. Thye Charitable Lead Trust, The Pierre and Pamela Omidyar Fund (Silicon Valley Community Foundation), The Philanthropic Collaborative, and W. K. Kellogg Foundation.