Community Development, Social Action and Social Planning

Alan Twelvetrees and Russell Todd

COMMUNITY

DEVELOPMENT, SOCIAL ACTION AND SOCIAL PLANNING

A Practical Guide

Sixth edition

Alan Twelvetrees and Russell Todd

Previous editions published in Great Britain by Palgrave Macmillan

First edition published in 1982

Second edition published in 1991

Third edition published in 2001

Fourth edition published in 2008

Fifth edition published in 2017

This edition published in Great Britain in 2024 by Policy Press, an imprint of Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1–9 Old Park Hill

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This new edition is dedicated to the memory, work and influence of Neil Jameson

Figures

List of figures and tables

Acknowledgements

To my grandchildren Kai, Callum, Lily, Charlie and Jack: may your lives be full of joy, love and adventure, with not too much heartache. And to the memory of two good friends and colleagues: Yelena Shomina, who passed away in 2021, and who, with others, worked wonders to promote community work in Russia; and Neil Jameson, founder of Citizens UK, who passed away in 2023.

Alan Twelvetrees

Swansea

To my wife, Sarah: your encouragement and support is my rock.

To my children, Morgan, Rosie and Gruff: Adfyd a ddwg wybodaeth, a gwybodaeth ddoethineb.

Thank you to everyone I’ve encountered in my career in communities across Wales. I’ve been humbled by your selflessness and inspired by your commitment.

In respect of this book, I wish to thank Jan Huyton, Allan Herbert, Louisa Addiscott, Eva Elliott, Ellie Farmahan and Liz Bickerton.

Russell Todd Cardiff

Preface

Alan’s preface

For this sixth edition, and the first with Policy Press, I have, for the first time, had a writing partner. Like me, Russell Todd is based in south Wales, but he is much younger than I and he brings new and different perspectives. He has contributed to all the chapters and taken the lead on a couple, and he has also been a sounding board for other observations. Likewise, I have been able to impart my experience to him. It has been a productive and enjoyable relationship and, we hope, one that can continue for a future edition.

I wanted to see the book continue beyond me, perhaps out of a degree of arrogance but also based on the feedback I have received from readers in several different countries. Once, in Australia, after I gave a public lecture on community work, a student said in a rather surprised voice: “Well, I understood every word!” So there does seem to be a continuing need for easily accessible writing about practice which uses theory in a way that connects with people’s experiences.

When I used to teach community work at Swansea University in Wales, I would ask new students: What is community work? They would all have their own ideas, sometimes very different from each other’s, and some students were astounded to discover that there were so many varying perspectives, several of which they had not considered. Also, our view of community work tends to change over time. When I started out as a community worker, on a social housing scheme in England, my model of it was of the worker operating primarily as an enabler at very local level, supporting collective action by the (geographical) community – anything from helping residents set up a playgroup to assisting them to organise a march on the town hall about the poor state of housing repairs. But there is a lot more to it, as we will see.

Community development, social action and social planning consist of a range of related but slightly different activities, all of which are essentially very practical. This is the essence of the book. Having said that, you really do have to understand what you are doing and the various pitfalls, because, if not, you may get burnt out and not do much good. As well as drawing on our own experiences, as in previous editions, we draw on contributions from other writers and practitioners.

This edition was written during the global COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions enforced by that. During this remarkable period, the internet and digital technologies played a role in maintaining social relations, and they had an important part in the development of the Black Lives Matter

and #MeToo movements that also characterised the period in which this edition was written. The pace with which these movements spread to different countries, establishing almost pan- global coverage, was, to me at least, astonishing. I suppose, though, that they are not new campaigns per se, but rather new expressions of ‘traditional’ campaigns in pursuit of race and gender equality. Campaigning organisations – such as those against whaling, against plastic in the oceans, for equal pay – all have workers, paid and non-paid, to fur ther their missions and build solidarities across campaign ‘boundaries’. So a big question is: Should we call these people ‘community workers’?

Such people certainly need pretty much the same skills. However, as one must draw the line somewhere, we only cover campaigning relatively briefly. Nevertheless, we do believe that, as community workers, you need to be aware of all of the dimensions of your work and to be able to locate it in a wider context and look at any situation from a range of perspectives. As well, you need to be alert to the impact on their practice of technological changes. The more angles from which you can view your work, the more likely it is you will make better decisions. Russell and I hope you will find that this book ‘speaks’ to you. If so, and even if not, please let us know.

Russell’s preface

Like many community workers, I ‘fell’ into it by chance. It was never part of any grand plan. I recall that when I was a child, my salesman father would work long hours travelling around south Wales. I would often trace with my finger his journeys in an atlas. Whether this instilled and nurtured a fascination with place or that was there all along, I do not know, but for me one of the joys of community work has been spending time in communities, getting beneath the skin of them, meeting the personalities, hearing the stories … and then hearing a contrasting perspective from someone who knows what really happened!

Place matters. People’s connection to place matters. It helps make community. Even though many of the communities I have spent time in over my career continue to feel the effects of postindustrial decline, I have been struck by the strength and fortitude that lie in these connections. As I say, community work was never something I set out to do. I undertook no formal study or training in it. Had I done a degree in youth and community, or similar, no doubt I would have encountered one of the early editions of Alan’s Community Work. Instead, four or five years into my career, someone in a mentor role at the programme I was working in suggested I try and get hold of a copy.

What struck me most was how it affirmed my personal experiences. Alan described situations that I recognised, indeed had struggled with (and would

continue to do so!). If others were experiencing these same things, then I must have been doing it right. Sort of. Ish. I came to realise early on that one of my favourite elements of community work is meeting people, chatting to them and making a mental note of how I might work with them down the line. Thanks to Alan’s book, I could now call that ‘contact making’. That internal dialogue I have with myself on the way home from an evening meeting about how it went? That is ‘reflection’, and in his book Alan stressed how important that process is.

Alan and I eventually came to know one another from sitting on the board of a community development charity. Just after he completed the previous edition, Alan passed me an advance proof. It had only a limited reference to information technology and other digital technologies, and to the role of social media. Although other aspects of the book were still relevant to my work, this stood out to me because using such technologies – smar tphones, podcasts, mailing lists, lots of social media – is my daily reality, and the reality of the many dozens of community workers I encounter. I politely pointed this out to Alan, who took the criticism well I recall … so well that he invited me to contribute to this new edition and bring to it my experiences of community work in the ‘digital age’, even though face-to-f ace contact remains a staple of generic and specialist community work alike.

My contribution increased far more than we initially anticipated, and though I am greatly honoured, it is surreal to receive a co-writing credit on a book that two decades earlier I regularly drew on as a ‘cub’ community worker.

The biggest honour, however, is playing a small part in helping cement Alan’s profound legacy on community work in Wales, the UK and beyond. The opportunity to work on this edition has been hugely rewarding. Diolch o’r galon, Alan.

Introduction

Generic and specialist community work

Following Alan’s approach in previous editions of this book, we use a dual model to classify community work. This sees two broad types of community work: generic and specialist. We have both been generic community workers and could, in principle, have taken up any issue in the neighbourhoods where we were employed. By contrast, in the specialist approach, the community worker is engaged to work with a specific group, for example, older people or refugees and asylum seekers; or on a specific issue – for example, health or environmental issue.

We have found that specialist workers tend to provide services for particular groups, as opposed to acting as facilitators – we see the latter as a core part of generic community work. We acknowledge that the increasing push in public and voluntary sector service provision to co-produce (sometimes called co-design or co-create) alongside service users is changing the nature of the service interface to be less transactional. Nevertheless, specialist community workers may not think of themselves as community workers, nor draw on the huge amount of knowledge and skills available in the community development field. Some recent commentators, recognising these developments and acknowledging the diversity of related interventions, now use the term ‘community practice’ in place of community work, to cover what has become a very wide field.

In the UK, it is fairly clear that generic community work has fallen out of favour somewhat with governments and policy makers. With some exceptions, large-scale and national programmes based on this model have disappeared (for instance, Communities First in Wales, a Welsh Government community-focused programme for tackling poverty, which ended in 2018). For these reasons, we pay greater attention in this edition than in the last one to specialist community work in the hope that the book will be read by such workers as well as by the broader community development readership. We also hope to assist specialist workers to understand the importance of acquiring generic community development skills.

Self-knowledge in community work

With a few exceptions, community work in the UK has emphasised the somewhat technical tasks of building smallish organisations, paying little attention to the community workers’ need for self-knowledge. Kelly and Westoby (2018) have addressed this concern with their ‘implicate method’

for developing self-knowledge as a prerequisite for working with others. We draw on their approach, but also on the work of non-community work writers to indicate how having self-knowledge, building relationships and motivating people are vital in many sectors. We wish we had read this sort of material before we started out as fieldworkers!

Drawing on experts and our own experience

The US academic Jack Rothman once told Alan how he had come to write his classic article ‘Three models of community organization practice’ (1968), in which he set out locality development, social planning and social action as the three types of community work practice. At the beginning of the graduate programme he taught, Rothman would ask his students to describe their approaches to practice, and they would respond by describing their work in terms of these three approaches. Rothman’s article is quite short and Alan had already been a community worker for several years by the time he read it, nevertheless Alan had a ‘eureka’ moment: realising that he had already been thinking in terms of these approaches, though without putting names to them. Hence the title of this and the previous edition of the book, with many thanks to Jack. Note that we replace Rothman’s term ‘locality development’ with ‘community development’, but the meaning stays the same.

We have included several contributions, of varying length, by specialists on, among others, broad-based organising, anti-discr iminatory practice and evaluation. This is partly because the field is now (maybe always was) so wide that we cannot possibly know enough about all the types of practice we want to cover. Far better to get experts in the different fields to write with the nuance their experience provides.

As in previous editions, examples from our own experience are used to draw out some of the issues that come up in the topics covered. This is done in the hope that these issues will ‘speak’ to readers in many different situations and across different countries, not just to a UK readership. Nevertheless, Wales is home for both of us and we draw heavily on our experiences and practice there, though, we hope, in a way which draws out universal issues.

The audience

Past editions of this book have focused primarily on those ‘doing’ community work in what used to be referred to as ‘industrialised countries’. But this term covers a diverse range of societies, and within these differences in practice are observable. These are as much to do with how states are internally configured and governed (for example, federal forms of government or

autonomous regions) as cultural differences within countries, many of which are very populous indeed.

A related point is that the tendency to distinguish between practice in the so-called ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds has been replaced with less pejorative references to the ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’, which implicitly acknowledge that the world continues to experience uneven and unequal benefits from economic activity both between and within countries, and that some countries are still marked by the impact of centuries of colonialism and imperialism. Inevitably, different parts of the book will appeal to different readers, but we hope that everyone will benefit from the range of topics covered.

Being culturally responsive and aware of multiple inequalities

It is paramount that community workers are culturally responsive in their work. The book refers to oppression, discrimination and marginalisation as well as more positive phenomena, such as empowerment and advancement. It is crucial that workers understand that such situations are experienced differently by the individuals involved, based on a host of factors related to their ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, age, language(s), faith and so on. Community workers should also understand that oppression and discrimination can be overt or covert. But community workers, despite the very best of intentions – and training – may end up unintentionally marginalising or discriminating against persons or groups. Later in the book, we cover aspects of community work related to these issues.

As we prepared this edition, we were aware of debates in the UK about the need to decolonise things such as education curricula, museum collections even one’s mind. As supportive of these efforts as we are, we recognise that for us, this will be an ongoing process. Moreover, is it enough to only decolonise? Michelle Dunscombe from the Jeder Institute in Australia stresses the importance of going beyond a process of decolonisation to reindigenise (Inter national Association for Community Development, 2022); only then can the true harm of colonialism be confronted and redressed.

Just as the community worker needs to consider which aspects of this book are most relevant to their work, they must also think about the cultural context in which they are working.

Structure of the book

As Popple (2015) notes, community work is informed by a wide range of theories, and there are many different aspects of this type of work and many contexts in which it takes place. In this edition we wanted a title and structure which signal our attempt to cover many of the different

aspects and models, which include community care, community organising, community education, feminist community work, youth work and antiracist work. In Chapter 1, we also draw on several writers who have developed different models of community work theory and practice.

While the title draws heavily on Rothman’s typology – still, we think, the most useful way of conceptualising community work practice – the structure of this edition, reflecting our wider approach, seeks to amplify it, in much the same way Rothman himself did later (see Rothman, 2008). But in amplifying it, we also, as is to be expected, modify it slightly from previous versions of this book, thanks to the further reading and study we have undertaken and the practice we have been informed about and exposed to.

Underlying the subjects covered in the book is a central, but often unstated or only implied, theme in community work – namely, how can this activity, in whatever guise, bring about significant change? Do these forms of intervention really bring about something substantial, or are we just tinkering at the edges? Clearly, neighbourhood- level community development work only brings about modest change, but what about radical practice or broad-based organising? Or can the social planning approach ratchet up the social change effect? We hope that we deal fairly with all these approaches, and in such a way that the reader can begin to grasp all of them. We hope as well that we provide some useful guidance for how to do the job and cope with the many pitfalls.

The book is in four parts. Part One introduces the main theoretical perspectives in community work and envisages these along a continuum of practice. It also looks at the process of planning to ensure effective community work, and considers ‘survival’ and reflective practice in this profession.

Part Two is about various dimensions of community development and community action. It starts off with a look at the facilitative approach of helping people set up and run community groups. Then it covers some technical aspects of community work, such as working within the law and financial management. There is a chapter on digital technologies that are increasingly used by community workers, and a chapter on evaluation. We also look at ideology and the influence on community work of concepts such as feminism and radicalism. Finally, a chapter by the late Neil Jameson covers broad-based community organising and its growth in the UK.

Part Three is about social planning. Here, we look at the requirement in public sector programmes that are geared towards community improvement for community work to be part of a nexus of relations, including partnerships and agencies. We also look at the transition from a fieldworker role to a managerial role and consider what management brings with it by way of responsibilities, including in relation to partnership working.

Part Four explores specialist community work, which involves work with groups defined by shared characteristics and interests and work in specific sectors. We explore more fully the distinction between generic and specialist community work. There is a chapter on advanced practice, which explores the role of community work in communities that have been affected by forms of conflict and overt oppression. We also look at anti-discr iminatory practice and community economic development. There is a chapter on strategic programmes that involve community work.

As Baumann (2000) says, modernity is fluid and the unexpected is always happening. Those involved in community work must try to come to grips with changes and ask themselves what their practice has to offer in new circumstances. Although innovations in digital technologies represents one of the most obvious changes taking place, there are of course other changes in practice and in society that community workers must keep up with. Likewise, it is important to keep up with the recent literature, which brings us up to date with current approaches and concepts, though the earlier theories remain relevant and we continue to draw on them.