THE LEARNING TREE
Provides professional development consulting services to local, regional, and national institutions. We teach the practices of Asset-Based Community Development and help shift the mindsets of people with power.
Asset-based community development emphasizes and leverages a community's existing strengths, resources, and capacities for sustainable development and overall well-being of its residents.
MISSION STATEMENT – Why we exist
“To invite people”
Our work is first and foremost an invitation. An invitation to pay attention and get to know one’s neighbors. An invitation to be astonished by their gifts. An invitation to tell more people. An invitation to gather and celebrate.
“To multiply goodness in the world”
Good work cannot be accomplished alone. We build trust throughout the neighborhood with our neighbors. We develop trust beyond the neighborhood with larger institutions and systems of power. We connect our neighbors with larger institutions and systems of power because goodness in the world multiplies when we first can find goodness in each other.
“By revealing gifts and talents of neighbors”
In a neighborhood that is undervalued and has historically been characterized as “low-income, low-wealth,” we work to discover and cultivate residents’ gifts, which have long been invisible. We believe each of our neighbors has gifts, talents, and passions that, once made visible, have unlimited potential to catalyze the power within themselves.
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“Cultivating opportunities”
We choose to invest in our neighborhood residents through a new currency - our social capital. Strengthening relationships and connecting neighbors with leaders of influence allow us to highlight individuals’ gifts and talents in ways that build community, economy, and mutual delight.
“Creating a culture of abundance”
When neighborhoods are perceived as deficient and broken, residents begin to believe they are deficient and broken. With asset-based community development, we look what assets exists in a neighborhood, as opposed to what is scarce. We perceive and treat our neighbors not as deficient and broken, but as sacred. We highlight the abundance found in their gifts.
“For social transformation.”
When we make it a common practice to see and invest in people’s gifts, we become witness to the transformation in how they see themselves. When people transform, systems transform. When systems transform, society transforms.
CONSULTING SERVICES
Deamon Harges
Founder of The Learning Tree /Social Banker
Wildstyle
Roving ILLustrator
Tyler Collins
Cultivator of Joy/The Healer
Alisa Richwine
Executive Spirit
Simone Jenkins
Project Manager/Imaginator
Jada Ford
Roving Listener/Storyteller