2 What is community development?

2

What is community development?

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).

Box 2.1: IACD’s eight common themes and areas of practice for community development

Themes

Values into practice

Engaging with communities

Participatory planning Organising for change

Learning for change

Diversity and inclusion

Leadership and infrastructure

Developing and improving policy and practice

Area of practice

Understand the values, processes and outcomes of community development, and apply these to practice in all the other key areas. Understand and engage with communities, building and maintaining relationships with individuals and groups. Develop and support collaborative working and community participation. Enable communities to take collective action, increase their influence and if appropriate their ability to access, manage and control resources and services. Support people and organisations to learn together and to raise understanding, confidence and the skills needed for social change. Design and deliver practices, policies, structures and programmes that recognise and respect diversity and promote inclusion. Facilitate and support organisational development and infrastructure for community development, promoting and providing empowering leadership. Develop, evaluate and inform practice and policy for community development, using participatory evaluation to inform and improve strategic and operational practice.

IACD (2018, p 17, Table 1: Themes and Key Areas). See IACDStandards-Guidance-May-2018_Web.pdf (iacdglobal.org).

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

Box 2.2: ECDN’s Statement on Community Development

Core principles

• Collective action; • Equality, Diversity, Tolerance; • Partnership, Solidarity and Co-operation; • Participation; • Creative and Innovative organisation.

Some shared concepts

• Delivers interdisciplinary, professional and independent support to groups of people; • Identifies, together with local people, community problems; • Increases the empowerment of local people so that they can organise themselves in order to solve problems; • Turns its attention primarily to people struggling with social deprivation, poverty, inequality and exclusion; • Contributes to a sustainable community based on mutual respect and social justice; • Challenges power structures which hinder people’s participation; • Contributes to the socio-cultural development of the neighbourhood through local people.

http://eucdn.net/statement

Many people and agencies contribute to community development. This chapter will focus primarily on the role of the community