Developing a Community Asset Framework for Mapping Strengths and Supporting Resilience in Washington State

Abstract

Environmental justice (EJ) mapping tools have advanced the understanding of cumulative environmental health impacts and supported policy, planning, and resource allocation. In Washington State, the Environmental Health Disparities (EHD) Map has become a key tool for visualizing where environmental harms and vulnerabilities are concentrated. However, the EHD Map, like other EJ mapping tools, primarily focuses on burdens, cumulative risks, and vulnerabilities, resulting in an incomplete perception of communities. The focus on deficits and needs creates a gap, as current approaches overlook and fail to account for the assets, strengths, and capacities that communities possess. This gap is important because it frames resilience not just as reducing risk but also as the ability of communities to draw on valued assets, relationships, knowledge, and services to support health, adapt to changing conditions, and recover from adversity. Building on the identified gap and calls from community members in Washington State for an asset-based approach that incorporates community assets contributing to resilience into a tool that complements the EHD Map, this thesis develops an initial framework for future community asset mapping. Through a scoping review of peer-reviewed literature, Chapter 2 examines and synthesizes 47 articles on how community assets and community strengths are conceptualized and identifies recurring definitions, categories, examples, and conceptual approaches to inform the development of a community asset framework that can be translated into a mapping tool. Chapter 3 builds on the scoping review to develop an initial Community Asset Framework for Washington State, comprising four categories: people, places, social connectedness, and community resources/services. Six key informant interviews with nine community leaders and practitioners were then utilized to assess the framework's alignment with their lived experiences and work. Across both chapters, community assets emerged as multidimensional, relational, resilience-supporting, and local. Findings suggest that asset-based approaches can complement existing deficit-based approaches by recognizing not only the harms and vulnerabilities communities experience, but also the assets, strengths, and capacities of communities. This work provides a foundation for a successive framework and future community asset mapping efforts to support a more balanced approach to EJ in Washington State.