Encyclopedia:
Community development,
Community Development Block Grant,
Office of Community Development,
Community development bank,
Talk:Community development,
Community development financial institution,
Community Development Council,
Housing and Community Development Act,
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Portal:Community/Community development
Community development, informally called
community building, is a broad term applied to the practices and academic disciplines of civic leaders, activists, involved citizens and professionals to improve various aspects of local communities.
Community development seeks to empower individuals and groups of people by providing these groups with the skills they need to effect change in their own communities. These skills are often concentrated around building political power through the formation of large social groups working for a common agenda. Community developers must understand both how to work with individuals and how to affect communities' positions within the context of larger social institutions.
Community development practice
Community development
practitioners are involved in organizing meetings and conducting searches within a
community to identify problems, identify assets, locate resources, analyse local power structures, assess human needs, and investigate other concerns that comprise the community's character
http://qed.emcdda.europa.eu/journal/papers5.shtml (case study example). These practitioners, sometimes called social
activists, use social resources to get the economic and political leverage that a community uses to meet their needs. Often, the social resources within the community are found to be adequate to meet these needs if individuals work collectively through techniques like
cooperation and
volunteerism. A form of community development that links academic resources to community problems in a reciprocally beneficial manner is
community-based participatory research (CBPR), a form of research which engages a community fully in the process of problem definition/issue selection, research design, conducting research, and interpreting the results. One of the principal ways in which CPBR differs from traditional
research is that instead of creating knowledge for the advancement of a field or for knowledge's sake, CBPR is an iterative process, incorporating research, reflection, and action in a cyclical process.
A number of different approaches to community development can be recognised, including:
*
Community economic development (CED)
* Community capacity building
http://comdevideas.blogspot.com*
Social capital formation
*
Political participatory development*
Nonviolent direct action*
Ecologically sustainable development*
Asset-based community development*
Community practice social work*
Community-based participatory research (CBPR)
The history of community development
Community Development has been a sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit goal of community people, aiming to achieve, through collective effort, a better life, and has occurred throughout history. In the 18th Century the work of the early
socialist thinker
Robert Owen (1771-1851), sought through Community Planning, to create the perfect community. At
New Lanark and at later utopian communities such as
Oneida in the USA and the
the New Australia Movement in Australia, groups of people came together to create intentional utopian communities, with mixed success. Such community planning techniques became important in the 1920s and 1930s in East Africa, where Community Development proposals were seen as a way of helping local people improve their own lives with indirect assistance from colonial authorities.
Mohondas K. Gandhi adopted African community development ideals as a basis of his South African Ashram, and then introduced it as a part of the Indian
Swaraj movement, aiming at establishing economic interdependence at village level throughout India. With Indian independence, despite the continuing work of
Vinoba Bhave in encouraging
grassroots land reform, India under its first Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru adopted a centralist heavy industry approach, antithetical to self-help community development ideas.
Community Development became a part of the
Ujamaa Villages established in
Tanzania by
Julius Nyerere, where it had some success in assisting with the delivery of education services throughout rural areas, but has elsewhere met with mixed success. In the 1970s and 1980s, Community Development became a part of "Integrated Rural Development", a strategy promoted by United Nations Agencies and the World Bank. Central to these policies of community development were
*
Adult Literacy Programs, drawing on the work of Brazilian Educator
Paulo Freire* Youth and Womens Groups, following the work of the Serowe Brigades of Botswana, of
Mr Patrick van Rensburg.
* Development of Community Business Ventures and particularly
Cooperatives, in part drawn on the examples of
José María Arizmendiarrieta and the
Mondragon Cooperatives of the
Basque Region of Spain
* Compensatory Education for those missing out in the formal education system, drawing on the work of
Open Education as pioneered by
Michael Young.
* Dissemination of
Alternative Technologies, based upon the work of
E. F. Schumacher as advocated in his book
Small is Beautiful: Economics as if people really mattered* Village Nutrition Programs
* Village
Village Water Supply Programs
Community development in Canada has roots in the development of co-operatives, credit unions and caisses populaires. The "Antigonish Movement" which started in the 1920s in Nova Scotia, through the work of Doctor Moses M. Coady and Father Jimmy Tompkins, has been particularly influential in the subsequent expansion of community economic development work across Canada.
In the 1990s, following critiques of the mixed success of "top down" government programs, and drawing on the work of
Robert Putnam, in the rediscovery of
Social Capital, Community Development internationally became concerned with social capital formation. In particular the outstanding success of the work of
Muhammad Yunus in
Bangladesh with the
Grameen Bank, has led to the attempts to spread
microenterprise credit schemes around the world.
Community building and organizing
thumb|225px|[Rise: London United festival • July, 2005]
Community building is a field of practices directed toward the creation or enhancement of
community between
individuals within a regional area (such as a
neighbourhood) or with a common interest. It is sometimes encompassed under the field of community development.
A wide variety of practices can be utilized for community building, ranging from simple events like
potlucks and small
book clubs, to larger–scale efforts such as mass
festivals and building
construction projects that involve local participants rather than outside contractors.
thumb|left|125px|[ARISE Detroit!]
Activists engaged in community building efforts in
industrialized nations see the apparent
loss of community in these societies as a key cause of
social disintegration and the emergence of many harmful behaviors. They may see building community as a means to increase
social justice, individual
well-being and reduce negative impacts of otherwise disconnected individuals.
Community organizing is a process by which people are brought together to act in common self-interest. While organizing describes any activity involving people interacting with one another in a formal manner, much community organizing is in the pursuit of a common
agenda. Many groups seek
populist goals and the ideal of
participatory democracy. Community organizers create social movements by building a base of concerned people, mobilizing these community members to act, and developing leadership from and relationships among the people involved.
See also
*
Community*
BetterTogether*
Community organizing*
Community practice*
Rural community developmentReferences
*
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/TOPIC_SERIES_IFAS_Community_Development University of Florida Community Development Series *
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/citizens-handbook The Citizen's Handbook*
http://cdj.oupjournals.org/ Community Development Journal (Oxford)*
http://www.uccb.ca/ced/ Community Economic Development Institute (Cape Breton University)*
http://smartcommunities.typepad.com/ Smart Communities Blog*
http://comdevideas.blogspot.com Community Development IdeasExternal link
*
http://usfcollab.usf.edu/PDF/socialcapital.pdf Social Capital at the University of South Florida Collaborative
Category:Urban studies and planningCategory:Community building
