During UNC-Chapel Hill's 2026 Engagement Week, the Carolina Across 100 (CX100) team led the session "Community Asset Mapping for Mental Health." What is asset mapping, and how can communities use this tool to address issues that are important to them? 

What is asset mapping? 

Asset mapping is a commonly used method in public health to identify, describe, and often (but not always) geographically visualize a community's official and unofficial resources. "Official resources" include assets such as funding, supportive policies, and formal partnerships, while "unofficial resources" might refer to interpersonal relationships, local history, and culture. Asset mapping provides information about the strengths and resources of a community and can help uncover connections between resources and solutions community-identified issues.  

How have we used asset mapping in CARE4Youth? 

To support the goal of improving youth and young adult behavioral health in North Carolina, the CX100 team has trained the CARE4Youth community teams in asset mapping. This practice has been helpful in multiple ways: 

1. To help communities inventory their resources  

The teams involved in CARE4Youth, and other motivated and passionate leaders across the state, often begin their work because they see a problem that needs fixing. This problem might be made workby lack of resources, capacity, and other challenges. The process of asset mapping shifts mindsets away from the things we wish were different and that we don't have, to the resources and strengths that already exist in our community that we can use. 

2. To help communities save time and effort 

Asset mapping provides an opportunity to inventory what already exists, community teams are prompted to consider what relationships and resources that could be strengthened and/or better utilizedbefore trying to create something new. This allows communities to make the best use of their time and effort. 

Once a community's strengths and resources are inventoried, they can more easily think about how to use them to address community needs and improve outcomes.

3. To make the connections between resources clear 

By mapping their community resources, teams have discovered connections between organizations, people, and resources that they previously were unaware of. This deepened understanding will be helpful as they connect youth and young adults with holistic supports for their mental and behavioral health needs. 

4. To identify gaps 

As teams completed a worksheet documenting resources across different categories and then visualized these assets, it became clear which areas they needed to continue to seek resources within. For example, some teams found that while their community may have healthcare resources that could be helpful, they have not yet leveraged these assets.  

Asset Mapping in Practice: Examples from CARE4Youth Teams

Asset mapping is not one-size-fits-all

The following aspects of asset mapping can look different by community, project focus, and more:

What new insights emerged during the Engagement Week session?

Asset mapping can help break down silos, but our personal and professional identities shape what resources we identify 

Session attendees described how helpful asset mapping could be to break down organizational "silos" that limit the sharing of information and/or resources within sectors or organizations. But they noted that the information that they added to the asset map was biased towards their own personal and professional backgrounds. For example, those who had worked in human services found it easier to think of healthcare and social service resources than other categories. 

"I had [a category] that was really easy for me to get stuck on, and I just kept creating ones that were health and social services related… I was like, okay, refocus, look at the other [categories]." 

This experience speaks to the importance of cross-sector teams addressing community issues, so that a diversity of experiences and perspectives will inform which assets are identified and inventoried.   

It's essential to be clear about the issue you're seeking to address 

To encourage session attendees to engage with the activity how they felt best equipped, they were able focus on any community when considering the issue that had been assigned to them. However, attendees shared that it was more helpful to focus on a specific area, such as Chapel hill, North Carolina, or their hometown, to complete the asset map. 

When communities complete this activity, it is also important to be clear about what issue the assets are meant to address. Attendees said that identifying assets in the first part of the session felt difficult without knowing exactly what issue the resources would be applied toward. When given an issue to focus on, it helped them identify new resources to consider and to creatively connect other resources they had already identified. 

What did the session attendees create? 

One group got creative in their approach to creating an asset map for housing affordability, using the metaphor of a house to organize resources related to housing in Chapel Hill and Orange County. "You have your foundation, so we had sort of foundational things on the bottom, like tax revenue, infrastructure, water and wastewater, property taxes, that kind of thing. You have your windows and doors as potential access points, things like policies. We also had different rooms for students versus other community members because they have different needs. Our roof was organizations that are helping get people into housing, like Habitat for Humanity and Hope NC." 

Another group visualized the resources that could be helpful for preventing Opportunity Youth disconnection. "We drew a tree. Where the water's coming fromis where the resources are coming from, and we focus more on preventive at the bottom, and then through the trunk is more of that middle ground of trying to re-engage youth. At the top we have internships, fellowships, and opportunities to re-engage youth."