Participatory Asset Mapping enables communities to build political power through self-reliance and shared resources. It entails the self-identification of community assets, meaning that the community is not the object of external research.
John Kretzmann and John McKnight (1993) are often sited as the developers of Asset-Based Community Development, though it has been used by community organizers and artists for decades. Caroline Woolard and Jen Abrams, co-founders of the barter network OurGoods.org, used Asset Mapping to create an online resource for artists, designers, and craftspeople to help each other make independent projects without money from 2008-2015.
Asset Mapping played a central role in "Art in the Expanded Field" a seminar focused on Solidarity Art Economies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2014-16). The lesson plan describes the introduction to the practice, the use of the tool, the map, and the integration of the practice into the weekly structure. Susan Jahoda, who taught this course, uploaded this lesson plan from that course.
Caroline Woolard (b. 1984) is a New York-based artist who makes objects and systems at the intersection of art, technology, and political economy. She is the co-founder of barter networks OurGoods.org and TradeSchool.coop and cultural equity platforms BFAMFAPhD.com and StudyCollaboration.com.
Her work has been commissioned by MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Creative Time, the Brooklyn Museum, Cornell University, and Cooper Union. She is the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships including at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2016), the Queens Museum (2014), Eyebeam (2013), Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund (2010), Watermill (2011), and the MacDowell Colony (2009).
Recent scholarly writing on her work has been published in Artforum (2016); Art in America (2016); The New York Times (2016); and South Atlantic Quarterly (2015). Woolard has been named one of 11 Artists to Transform the Art World in 2017 (2017), has been listed in ArtNet's Top 20 Female Artists (2015) and the WIRED Smart List (2013).
Woolard is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of Hartford; her projects are the subject of three documentaries by PBS / Art21 for New York Close Up; her forthcoming book about the future of arts pedagogy, Ways of Being, co-authored by Susan Jahoda and designed by Emilio Martinez Poppe as a contribution to BFAMFAPhD, will be published by Punctum Books in 2018. http://carolinewoolard.com
Susan Jahoda is an artist, educator, and organizer whose work includes video, photography, text, performance, installation and research based collaborative projects. Works have been produced for venues in London, Paris, Basel, New York, Seoul, and Moscow. Currently, Jahoda is a core member of BFAMFAPhD, and a co-founder of NYC To Be Determined and The Pedagogy Group, collectives of socially engaged artists and educators based in New York City.
Jahoda has organized exhibitions and screenings including Documents from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, Interference Archive, Brooklyn, (2014-15), Susan Kleckner and Documents from the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, (2013), The Martha Rosler Library, and Beyond the Instance of an Ending, (2009), Setting in Motion (2006), and Global Priority (2002), This is My body: this is My Blood, (1992), Herter Art Gallery, UMass, Amherst. She has published short stories and essays including "Spring Flowers," in Class and its Others, University of Minnesota Press, (2000) and “Theatres of Madness,” in Deviant Bodies, Indiana University Press, (1995). In 1993, Jahoda joined the collective and journal, Rethinking Marxism, where she continued to serve as arts editor until 2014.
Her projects have received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and The Trust for Mutual Understanding, NYC. Jahoda is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and resides in New York City.