One of the reasons I started this blog was to help stimulate discussion about the asset development field that I find so exciting and full of promise for our country.
I can’t say that my blog has been a venue for tremendous amounts of discussion via reader comments compared, say, to the piling on that occurs at blogs like perezhilton.com (Hollywood’s Most Hated Web-Site!) or, for the tweedier set, the Times’ Freakonomics blog.
In part, that’s because the asset development field is very much a niche product, but it’s also because the field itself hasn’t been quick to adopt blogging tools and encourage a virtual community of bloggers examining the field and paying attention to each other’s posts. I could find no one blogging specifically about asset development when I launched Asset Almanac in March 2007. The Woodstock Institute had been blogging about community economic development in general since late 2005, and there were a few others interested in this kind of community work, but I still felt pretty lonely out there in cyberspace getting all worked up about individual development accounts and financial education.
Indeed, more than a year later, the asset development field still can’t claim to have generated its own blogosphere (not enough points to call it a sphere), but I can start to see the outline of a blogagon — with at least half a dozen blogs pitching their voices out into the ether on a semi-regular basis with commentary that’s directly relevant to the asset development field.
Credit Slips, the musings of seven academics on all things credit- and bankruptcy-related, is not dedicated to the asset development field specifically, but in this time of financial crisis the credit and bankruptcy woes of low income Americans are getting major attention from our field, making Credit Slips feel closely tied to our everyday work.
The Community-Wealth.org blog is less packed with analysis, but it does offer links to asset development-related news from around the country.
A great new addition to our blogagon is The Ladder, providing commentary from the Asset Building Program of the New America Foundation:
The primary goal of our program is to ensure that assets–broadly conceived–become a permanent feature of how social policy is conceived, developed, and delivered in the United States and around the world. In our view, broadening access to asset ownership is just a means for enabling people to fulfill their aspirations, achieve their goals, and reach their full potential. {You get it, right? The ladder is the means for going up to where you want to go, reach for the stars, clean the gutter, etc….
We plan to use this space make these connections and offer our commentary. As you will see, we take an expansive view of the asset building field and offer a wide range of perspectives. What we will strive to offer across the board is being on the lookout for concrete and creative ways to show how opportunity and ownership go hand in hand.
The Asset Policy Initiative of California (APIC) has created a blog that’s keeping a good eye on asset development issues, with a particular emphasis on the scene in “our country’s largest laboratory,” as I heard someone describe California.
And last but not least, I’ll mention Dylan Higgins’ blog Hear My Echo, which shares many of my own eclectic interests: we both bring more of an individual perspective than an institutional or academic voice.
All in all, I’m excited to see this explosion growth of blogging about the asset development field. I hope it picks up speed as our field continues to mature.
