2: What is community development?

Publication Date:
18 Jan 2022
Pages:
13–34
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51952/9781447360742.ch002
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This chapter focuses on different understandings of community development. As indicated in Chapter 1, we use ‘community development’ as an umbrella term to cover a range of different methods for working with communities:

  • to open up opportunities for collective action;

  • to improve living conditions and services;

  • to uphold and extend rights; and

  • to support individual advancement.

We set out the core principles and processes that characterise community development and distinguish it from related approaches and concepts. We review different models for working with communities, as well as exploring the relationship between community development and similar strategies for achieving change.

Internationally, community development encompasses many approaches, contributing in different ways within a set of core principles or expectations (see Boxes 2.1 and 2.2).

The European Community Development Network (ECDN, 2014) has adopted a similar common framework that brings together the values and principles shared by its members.

Many people and agencies contribute to community development. This chapter will focus primarily on the role of the community worker or organiser, who is often an outsider, usually in a paid job that involves working with residents or community members to support leaders, activists and volunteers to come together, co-ordinate their efforts and achieve the change they desire.

As we will see in Chapter 5, community work is skilled and strategic, but its starting point always involves learning to understand the community from the inside, listening to people’s experiences, identifying priority concerns and long-term goals. Arising from these conversations, the worker will help groups to form or engage with existing networks, agreeing broad aims and establishing how they want to run themselves.

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