Article: Community development

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Community building. (Discuss)

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Community organizing. (Discuss)

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 and human needs, and investigate other concerns that comprise the community's character. 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 number of different approaches to Community Development can be recognised, including:

• Community economic development (CED)
• Community Capacity Building [1]
• Social Capital Formation
• Political Participatory Development
• Nonviolent Direct Action
• Ecologically Sustainable Development
• Assest Based Community Development
• Community Practice Social Work

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, 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 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 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

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.

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