Empowering people and communities? The power of stories in asset-based approaches to health inequalities

In response to the global impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, many national governments have implemented ‘fiscal consolidation’ measures, invoking long-standing neoliberal discourses which advocate reduction in public services and state welfare support. Meanwhile, assets-based approaches to health, including voluntary welfare provision, have gained traction internationally, proposed as a means to reduce health inequalities by ‘empowering’ people and communities. Presenting evidence from an ethnographic psycho-social study of volunteer experiences within two voluntary organisations, working within disadvantaged communities in northern England, this paper interrogates the notion of community empowerment, examining how power dynamics emerge in everyday practices and discourses. We identify two different narratives within these settings: redemption stories and collective victimhood. While these may offer some psychological refuge from dominant discourses which blame and shame people experiencing poverty, they also serve to reinforce perceptions of individual responsibility, failure, and powerlessness. We conclude that assets-based approaches can only fulfil their potential if they are resourced and delivered in ways that are sensitive and responsive to the reproduction of power relations within the organisational setting and in the wider contexts of people's lives. This requires critical attention to the underlying values and paradigms underpinning such interventions.