A brief history

This guide acknowledges that the term ‘community development’ is contested and compatible with a range of political ideologies (Meade et al, 2016a). In this edition we use the term ‘community worker’ to cover everyone working to co-ordinate and facilitate the contributions of community members, whether they are in paid roles, resident activists, leaders, active citizens or community-oriented volunteers.

As we shall consider more closely in Chapter 4, for some people, a sense of community supplies both the focus and the motivation to take action and press for change. The function that community plays in people’s lives and in policy will be a theme that we return to throughout the book, examining how community development skills and support are understood and applied by activists, professionals, policy makers and philanthropists to tackle the many challenges that face so many post-industrial societies.

A brief history

In the UK the fortunes and status of community development have waxed and waned. As an external intervention, it was initially used by philanthropic bodies (for example, the university settlements) to bring adult education and capacity building to disadvantaged neighbourhoods, such as the London Docklands. Local authorities and housing trusts later employed officers in new towns and estates to encourage residents to set up groups and associations for various leisure and civic purposes in order to generate ‘community spirit’ and promote self-help.

For a long time, community development raised for policy makers the spectre of the Community Development Projects of the 1970s (Loney, 1983), a government-sponsored programme whose Marxist critique of capitalism – despite striking a chord with many practitioners – was not quite what the politicians had in mind when they allocated funding to its 12 ‘deprived’ areas. Official thinking at the time imagined that community development could be used to address ‘deficits’ through targeted interventions that focused on externally defined problems rather than community-determined priorities. Since then, a more anodyne version of community development has been