Recap: Asset Mapping for the Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Workforce

On May 20th 2025, the Institute for Early Childhood Well-Being participated with the Institute for Community-Engaged Mental Health (ICEMH) in a transformative Asset Mapping Workshop at The Boston Foundation. This collaborative event brought together participants, including youth leaders, caregivers, educators, mental health professionals, researchers, and community organizers from across Boston.

Together, we explored a key question:
What strengths already exist in our communities that support mental health and well-being, especially for children and families?

From Deficits to Strengths: What is Asset Mapping?

Asset mapping is a practice rooted in community empowerment. Instead of starting with what’s broken, this process asks:
What’s working? What do people already rely on to care for one another?

Participants worked in small, cross-sector groups, mapping out trusted people, spaces, networks, and practices from after school programs to spiritual leaders, from peer support to playgrounds. Many identified informal caregivers, family traditions, youth mentors, neighborhood parks, and cultural practices as powerful anchors for wellness.

This shift in focus from deficits to assets not only challenges traditional models of research and intervention, but reclaims the narrative around what communities need. It reminds us that solutions already exist we just need to recognize, uplift, and invest in them.

Centering the Voices of Youth and Caregivers

A core value of the workshop was honoring the expertise of those closest to the issues. Throughout the day, youth and caregivers were not only invited to participate, they were centered.

Their reflections were powerful:

“We’re the ones living it, so we need to be at the table from the start.”
“Healing doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens in relationships.”
“There’s no one-size-fits-all. We each carry different tools from our families, our cultures, our neighborhoods.”

These voices offered critical insights into how mental health support should look and feel within the context of community, culture, and care.

Key Themes and Takeaways

• Community Knowledge is Data
  Stories, lived experience, and cultural knowledge are essential sources of insight. These must be valued as seriously as academic research.
• Mapping What Works
  We identified the people, places, and relationships that communities already trust; highlighting the many ways support exists beyond formal systems.
• Fixing Systems, Not People
  Participants emphasized that mental health challenges don’t stem from individual failures but from inequities embedded in systems. Real change requires structural shifts.
• Co-Learning in Community
  The space fostered mutual learning. Researchers, youth, and caregivers learned with and from one another; breaking down hierarchy in favor of shared knowledge.

A Living Map and a Growing Movement

The maps and conversations generated at the workshop are only the beginning. As a next step, we aim to deepen these partnerships, document the insights shared, and explore how this approach can guide future mental health research, programs, and policy, particularly in early childhood settings.

We are deeply grateful to our partners at ICEMH, to The Boston Foundation for hosting, and to every individual who brought their wisdom, presence, and heart to this work.

Together, we are reimagining what it means to support mental health, not from the top down, but from the inside out.

Watch the recap video from The Boston Foundation:
https://www.tbf.org/news-and-insights/videos/2025/may/icemh-asset-mapping-recap