Underpinning strategies

Underpinning strategies

In addition to its fundamental values, community development rests on four vital pillars or strategies:

• Networking • Collective action • Organisation development • Informal education

Networking

In order for people to collaborate and achieve meaningful change, they need to be connected with those who share their concerns, to find potential allies and partners, and to have links with decision makers or service providers who hold power and resources. Communities have natural attachments through families, neighbours, friendships and familiar faces seen out and about. But these networks tend to be exclusive and might not give access to the most useful ideas or assets. Most communities comprise patterns of biases and barriers that distort or prevent people relating to one another. A good networker who knows the community well can set up introductions, liaise across sectoral or area boundaries and facilitate networking opportunities so that community members can extend their own networks and reach into less familiar territory, thereby addressing social exclusion and power differentials (Gilchrist, 2019).

Collective action

A central tenet of community development is that it enables people to take collective action to tackle shared issues or to pursue a common cause. Community development works with people to identify goals and supports them to accomplish these. By coming together, comparing experiences and understanding the root causes of problems, people realise that their combined efforts can change situations, improve conditions and potentially challenge structural

disadvantage, for example in employment choices or accessing health services. This type of campaigning or self-help activism does not necessarily require setting up a formal organisation. Much can be achieved through informal arrangements using the ‘social power’ of civil society, such as local self-help networks, pressure groups or broader social movements (Sheila McKechnie Foundation, 2018). The important point is that people are not left to fend for themselves in making complaints or putting forward suggestions as isolated residents. Community development often provides the impetus for community members to decide what needs to be done to make the changes they want and then mobilise around a joint plan of action. It is about channelling the power of combined voices and determination: the strength of many people acting for themselves or in solidarity with others who find it more difficult to speak up and be heard.

Organisation development

Initial success sometimes reveals new possibilities and loose groupings of campaigners may need to develop an organisation in order to meet the changing demands of members as well as the expectations of other stakeholders, notably funders. In community development, this means helping a group to find a form that matches its current aims and functions while allowing for potential growth. It is best to strike a balance between meeting formal requirements and the flexibility and fun allowed by informal processes. Organisational structures and procedures should enable members to achieve their goals, to act legally and to be accountable to the membership and wider community. Community organisations sometimes reach a crisis point when members realise that their existing format simply doesn’t work any more or constrains them from partnering with other agencies. In many cases, a group may evolve to become more ‘hardshelled’, while retaining many of its informal aspects because these keep people feeling motivated and involved. Community development helps transitions like this, supporting members to reflect on what’s going wrong or discuss what could be done differently.

Informal education

Alongside developing organisational capacity, community development stimulates the acquisition and sharing of skills and knowledge, as well as fostering mutual understanding. Informal, popular or community education describes the learning that takes place mainly through people’s involvement in community activities and so it is sometimes described as experiential. Individuals improve their confidence and capabilities through taking on tasks, observing others, ‘having a go’ and receiving feedback. Opportunities for discussion ensure that useful experience and opinions are shared through listening, explanation and critical debate. Information, ideas and insights can also be gleaned from relevant materials and official publications as well as informal conversations. As Kahneman (2011) has suggested in a thorough analysis of cognitive failures and ingrained biases, ‘slow thinking’ is vital to avoid snap judgements or herd mentalities. This kind of analytic and reflective thinking helps to refute fallacies and to counter prejudices and conspiracy theories, for example in relation to climate denial or vaccine hesitancy. Positive informal learning increases people’s personal resilience, their openness to new ideas and their ability to take on unfamiliar roles and responsibilities.

Encouraging people to reflect on their experiences can be a useful stimulus to further learning and builds confidence in new roles. For many people, participation in community development activities represents an important step along the journey towards active citizenship, a career goal or a sense of self-worth. Most of us need feedback and encouragement from others, especially our peers. Rigorous scepticism is a prerequisite for evidence-based social advance, in science and elsewhere (McIntyre, 2018) including community development. Group debates and critical dialogue expose comfortable, but false, myths and can be used to create alternative and more balanced narratives. These discussions are also about learning to question received wisdom and to challenge authority. By actively supporting people to try out new skills, question assumptions and explore new ways of seeing the world, workers and leaders are using