Example engagements

Workshops: 

• Rural Asset Building for Positive Youth Development.  Facilitated series of 8 day-long workshops for leaders of small towns and rural communities across Indiana with the Indiana Youth Institute and local partners.
• Get Your Assets in Gear:  Advanced Community Economic Development workshop for directors and staff of State Economic Development departments and local community development corporations from the Northwestern states and British Columbia.  Anacordes, Washington
• Congregational Asset Mapping:  A weeklong retreat for 70 pastors and lay leaders of various denominations and faith communities from across Canada, sponsored by Conciliation Services Canada.

Conference speaking: 

• Keynote speaker, "Enough," Ecumenical Stewardship Center Winter Event, San Antonio.
• Keynote speaker, "Sustainable Communities in an Era of Globalization," Annual Gathering of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, Detroit.

Program development

• Author, The Networked Youth Development Center:  A Business Model for Systemic Community Change.  This report, produced with and for a coalition of youth-focused organizations in a Puerto Rican-identified community in Chicago, lays out an asset-based alternative to the traditional youth center.
• Consultant and Director, Congregational Asset Mapping Project, Evengelical Lutheran Church in America. Directed a national demonstration project and consulted with executive staff of 4 major divisions of the churchwide offices.

Strategic planning. 

• Community Development Fellow, DePaul University.  Advised and facilitated strategic planning for the university's Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC) and won unprecedented 3rd round funding from HUD.
• Facilitator, Stand With Africa, Here and Abroad coalition, Minnesota.
• Organizational Learning Coordinator, Blandin Foundation.

Resource Development: 

• 85% track record of success on grant proposals.
• Author of several winning proposals in highly competitive national grant awards.

Writing. 

• Author of several books and articles, as well as in-house reports and plans for clients.  Click on Publications.

Reproducible Sessions for Trainers

• Developer of Quick and Simple Experience in Asset Mapping, a one-hour session that can be immediately reproduced by participants to train and facilitate other groups.

Approach

In conferences, workshops, and in direct consultations with congregations and community groups, Luther Snow uses a hands-on, interactive approach. Participants want to come away with tangible skills that they can use right away. Asset-mapping lends itself to grassroots, participatory process that can be quickly learned and passed along.

Experience is the best teacher, so he has developed quick and simple exercises that allow participants to experience the simplicity and power of asset mapping in practice. In as little as an hour, participants experience and learn enough to be able to facilitate asset mapping themselves, in their congregations and communities.

Luther Snow brings to this work a deep understanding of the rural communities and urban neighborhoods. This understanding makes Snow optimistic about the future of rural and urban communities in the global economy.

Snow sees asset-mapping as a kind of doorway to “open-sum” process and thinking. To Snow, open-sum means that, by discovering and connecting our assets, you gain, I gain, and we all gain together. As such, asset-mapping is part of a larger movement of empowering concepts and efforts in church and community development. Snows respects and supports the complementary efforts of like-minded people in this larger movement.

Background

BA, Harvard College, magna cum laude, Government

MBA, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business

Luther Snow lives in Decorah, Iowa, where his wife, Lise Kildegaard, is professor at Luther College. There, Snow has trained entrepreneurs in self-employment and led the rural United Way and child care center.

Snow’s roots are in Chicago. He served as Executive Director of the Community Workshop on Economic Development, a coalition of grassroots, low-income community based organizations. In this context, Snow organized collaborative demonstration projects that resulted in peer sharing, policy development, and published results. He also worked for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a Chicago Alderman, and Bethel New Life. Snow makes a study of the comparisons between urban and rural development.